Discovery search is not functioning correctly

My game also dramatically reduced in search results. It used to be one of the first 10 games to show up when you searched “army” and then in August it got dropped to not even being in the top 80 of the search results. This has caused a dramatic reduction in visits to my experience.
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It’s first in the search results, maybe it got fixed

It’s 87th for me. It used to be in the top 10, until a few months ago.

I hope it’s not because Roblox started promoting games that make lots of money over ones that don’t, because my game was proud that it was free and didn’t nickel and dime its players.

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This happened to my game Slither Simulator a couple of days ago and it totally disappeared from all discoverability on the Roblox site after an update to my game’s description.

This line of text seems to be the culprit but I’m not exactly sure (don’t want to test it again)
10/11: Mini Playerlist + prevent eating w/ shield + respawn w/ full boost

Granted, there are some special characters in here, which may or may not have thrown off the moderation algorithm. While this was accepted by the “Update Experience” form on Roblox website, and passed moderation fine, it seems to have shadow banned my game. The shadow ban I experienced means like you can still see your game but it’s nearly impossible to actually find. It’s not in search. It’s not on your homepage under “Continue” where it always is. It doesn’t show up in your friends “Friends Activities” sort on their homepage. It’s not exactly offline but nobody who hasn’t bookmarked it will be able to find it. Devoted and clever players of my game resorted to visiting my Roblox profile page and then clicking my Creations tab.

Here’s a picture of my experience’s traffic that went down to 8 faithful players from the usual 300+ active players. When I noticed the issue I immediately reverted changes to the title and description and traffic bounced right back to normal levels.

A word of advice to those of us who maintain our game’s title and description: after any change, wait 15 minutes and then check if your game has disappeared from Roblox. If so, be prepared to hastily roll back those metadata changes or you’re going to get a crash in your traffic.

I’ve reported this to bug-support but didn’t yet get a reply.

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@Focia19 my game got shadow banned again today after an update to the description. I had an ad campaign going on too. Traffic dropped from 700+ to 30 visitors after a change to the description. Can you please see if I could be eligible for a refund of the ad campaign moneys lost during the outage due to this bug?

picture from developer stats, of traffic crash due to this shadow ban today, and it bounced right back up after i changed the description back

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here today again is another traffic crash on my game Slither Simulator
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@Focia19 please help, this time I did not update the description, but there was a Turkish translation that was updated today. my game is currently shadow banned from appearing on Roblox without any explanation or way to fix it this time. 911!

@thirdtakeonit @MisterGreenTurtle my game is currently shadow banned, not appearing in search, continue, favorites, etc. It was after an update to the translation to Turkish of one of my Badge descriptions. I need assistance immediately please, my game traffic is crashed again.

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my game doesn’t show up in Friend Activity and Continue I think it got falsely shadow banned

please help I need to sponsor my game ASAP

I’m having a similar issue right now on my game as well

The game completely disappeared from the search results despite the fact that it was ranked 37th on the keyword “soccer”. But today, it is nowhere to be found even if you search the full name of the game:

The shadow-ban happened randomly today since it was just fine yesterday

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@KnightGaladeld
Hi, is the issue getting fixed right now?

Just asking because it’s been a month, people still having this issues and some games still being shadow banned.

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I’m still experiencing an issue where my game doesn’t show up high on the search results even when it has 2.5k+ ccu. I believe it could be this bug, any ways I can get this fixed?

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I noticed the odd traffic as well. I lost 3x concurrent players as soon as November hits. Bizarre behavior, even though there were updates. It would be nice to hear some word from the official ROBLOX staff about this. [👻UPDATE] Digimon Masters - Roblox

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This seems to be happening with classic clothing on the catalog to!

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Help 911 @Focia19 @KnightGaladeld my game Slither is shadow banned again today
Searches for “slither” do not show my game, which is usually the first result

This problem has is reoccuring for us as well. We were hit with it in late August, when visits dropped off a cliff:
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When using the Search function, our game was listed in the top 3, then suddenly dropped down into 12th place, with random non-related games appearing above.

This is now happening again (yes it is a Poop titled game):

It’s annoying that it is happening again as games lose visibility. Why isn’t the game name used as the primary index for search functions on the website.

It would be useful if I could raise a Bug Report, but despite having a game with 1.9M plays, i don’t seem to be able to create them.

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That’s the exact same time my game also got massively dropped in search results and as a result visits dropped a lot, too. It makes me think Roblox might have done something to update how search results are tabulated during August.

It’s certainly teaching me the lesson that I need to track the Search ranking more closely and keep any eye on players stats to know when it happens. Tracking of Daily player counts might be something I need to keep a record of. How do the rest of you guys track stats long term, beyond the game Developer Stats page?

I got hit right after they put out the ad changes too

Does anybody know how to fix this? We have now slipped for 3rd place to 16th when searching on the game name “Poop Simulator”. 90% of the search results bear no relation to the search term. @DeveloperRelations please help. We have a 2M player game disappearing into obscurity.

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You typed developers relation wrong, they can’t get pinged then

Thank you so much. Probably some overly emotional typing at the time.