Discovery search is not functioning correctly

[FirstVertex]

@xoroshoh you posted here on June 15

Game discovery is fundamentally broken and only getting worse, it needs to be fixed

Hello folks, Roblox search & discovery PM here. First, let me acknowledge and thank you for all the feedback provided in this thread and elsewhere. We are very grateful for such a passionate and involved community. Please rest assured that we hear you and that we are working hard on making Roblox better for developers and players alike. While we can’t respond to every post, we actively monitor the forum and use your feedback to inform our roadmap. We have some exciting changes coming up this y…

Your words state that you’re the PM of Roblox Search and Discovery, and that your team is actively monitoring the forum and that “we hear you” and “we are working hard”.

I call your bluff! I see no evidence of any truth in any of your words. Please prove me wrong.

I would like to know what your team is doing to fix this horrible issue of my game continuously being shadow banned.

It has been admitted by Roblox that this is a “mistake” and I want to hear directly from you what solution is being worked on.

I demand to be given a lifeline of communication when my game is banned, so that I do not have to wait 48 hours for the “mistake” to be temporarily fixed.

My players demand that the game be put back online. You can read their words in the game’s group or Disco server, linked below the game. My players spent money on Gamepasses and Developer Products that now gives no value because the game can’t be found.

I worked hard for months to develop this game, and to build up the game’s reputation, traffic, and popularity. I demand that there be some form of compensation for all of the downtime that I have experienced.

If this were an isolated incident, believe me, I would not so aggressively pursue a resolution. This has now happened to my game over 40 times and the only reason I continue to suffer is because Roblox takes no action to solve the problem, but continues to temporarily fix it and act like nothing’s wrong.

YOU are responsible for the Search and Discovery, so FIX IT!! THE THING IS TOTALLY BROKEN that YOU are in charge of. YOU are to blame for my emotional suffering and all of the losses I have experienced over the past moths.

I DEMAND that the traffic and reputation that has been lost, be restored by Roblox. You can send 1 million visits to my game after this mess is cleaned up that YOU’RE responsible for.

[FirstVertex]

Still banned 48 hours later, with no reply from Roblox support or devforum.

UPDATE: I changed the title of my game from this:
Slither Simulator [🎅🎅 2X GOLD]
to this:
Slither Simulator

And now it is unbanned.

Because those Santa emojis are so offensive, right?

Come on Roblox! The moderation is 100% broken! Fix your Regex’s!

[BadDad2004]

This is awful to hear. Not only are you as a developer impacted by the bizarreness of this problem, but players who have spent their Robux on your game now get no value.

I have heard rumours that the update they made to Search and Discovery was to prioritise the higher revenue games, ie those games that are already hugely popular. Obviously this is at the expense of everyone else on the platform, both players and developers. Lets face, we all get bored of even our most favourite games are a while.

This seems like a very slippery slope that only benefits the already popular games and Roblox itself. Someone please prove me wrong.

[R_obotz]

I can still see it

[nakata1609]

Well, you are not wrong. The roblox official discovery guidance seems to also claim that how much the game is making would also affect their discovery.

However, this bug in discovery was different. I had updates and were making more for roblox, yet the sudden hidden discovery changes pretty screwed up everything.

[FirstVertex]

Slither simulator is Banned right now. traffic crash from 450 to 30 players. I’m submitting a title update to try to fix it myself. @Focia19 @xoroshoh

The only reason this outage was so brief, is because I have now implemented a monitoring system that is working quite nicely to notify me every 30 minutes of my traffic. I am able to immediately change my title to remove or add the “.io” which can unban me. It is 100% ridiculous that I have to continue doing this, but hey, it beats losing thousands of Robux for days at a time waiting for someone to acknowledge or fix the ongoing problem.

[FirstVertex]

I’m reporting another ban on Slither Simulator this evening. I used my early warning traffic crash detection system to realize it was banned and quickly respond. Then I submitted a title update to add the “.io”. Waited 15 minutes and still it was not unbanned. So I submitted another title update to remove back the “.io” and now it is unbanned.

[ph33sh]

Are you determining that it is “banned” /not banned based on the search result placement? Because player drops could have to do with recent outages as well

[FirstVertex]

When it is banned that means it does not appear, at all, in any search. It does not appear, at all, in Continue and Friend Activity. The note from Roblox support tells it all:

What this says is, “we have a glitch in our moderation system, that nobody knows how to fix, we’re going to unban it this time, and next time you’ll have to go through the same 48 hour request and wait cycle again, because we’re going to treat this as an isolated incident every time you report it”

My alternative, is to “fix it myself” by closely monitoring it, waiting for it to get banned, then quickly responding by randomly updating my game’s title. If, in that case, I try to contact support, I’ll get a response like this:

What this says is, “our system is so cavalier as to quickly and silently ban your game, and keep no record of that action, all we can see, is whether it is right now banned, which is by the way, 48 hours since you reported it”.

[Qxual]

I can see your game on search right now.

[FirstVertex]

It’s an intermittent problem that takes it offline randomly 3 times a week. You happened to check it while it was online.

[FirstVertex]

Look at this rubbish response from Roblox support:

They have been provided with links to all of my devforum posts which contain numerous screen shots. Yet they are asking for a reply email with screen shots. They claim everything is working normally.

@Focia19 it has been 27 days since we heard anything from Roblox about this issue. Your last post said that this issue has “multiple heads” and you actually said “our engineers are actively investigating and working on a long term fix!”. Have they really been actively investigating for a month now? What did they find? What solutions have been put in place? When can I expect my life to go back to normal and stop having to post my problems on devforum and Roblox support every day?

[BadDad2004]

HELP. Our game got hit by the moderation glitch and has now been restored. However, we have disappeared from all searches. @Focia19 had fixed the problem previously.

@DeveloperRelatons please help return our game Poop Simulator - Roblox to the search pages. We were ranked in the top 10 but have now disappeared.

We’ve gone from 10k plays per day down to 0.

[FirstVertex]

@BadDad2004 yours appears to actually be under review, there is no Play button on the game’s page. That is a different issue than the shadow ban I have experienced, there is never any feedback to me, when that happens, and the game can still be played, just not found on the Roblox website. At least you can see the message on your game page and have an explanation of what is going on.

[BadDad2004]

Thats just weird. We don’t see any moderation message at our end, but I’ve just had a friend confirm it shows up for him. Thanks for letting me know.

[Focia19]

Hi again @FirstVertex!

I’m sorry you are still dealing with this issue!
I will contact the engineers shortly to check upon this problem and see where we are with the progress! Will come back with a reply as soon as I get one!

Also, sorry for the delay, because of this period of the year!

[VSCPlays]

has anyone found the game smile when searching for something?

[nakata1609]

I also changed my game name a couple of weeks ago due to this discovery issue. I found out a very interesting matter. It looks like my game discovery was locked to the old keyword “Digimon”. Searching for the newly changed name “Digital Monsters” does not bring up the game at all. Can you please fix this?

LINK: [🎄14X] Digital Monsters - Roblox

[FirstVertex]

@Focia19 we’re anxiously awaiting a fix. But here as we wait, is some vital information to consider about the damage that’s being done to experiences.

You can see here, in this screen shot from my User Acquisition tab in Developer Stats, that my experience’s reputation has been severely damaged due to 2 incidents.

Dec 20, my game is at an all time high of Search and Discovery 1M impressions, and receives a shadow ban later that day. I reported it here on the forum, and self-repaired it. The next day it gets half of the Impressions, and never really came fully back.

Dec 25, my game received 0.56M impressions, and received a shadow ban that evening, I was not aware of it right away, and due to holiday, was not able to immediately fix it, but I did report it to Roblox support, who did nothing, and actually denied any problem whatsoever. 2 days later I self-fixed it.

Now look at the Search and Discovery numbers since then. Struggling to get 100k impressions in Roblox S&D, presumably as a “penalty” for having a recent ban. Which was Roblox’s fault.

Even though it is no longer shadow banned, it has received some kind of penalty on Roblox’s discovery, wherein it is not receiving the same amount of coverage as it was before these bans. Even though now you can still find it, all that was lost has not been restored and cannot really be measured. Can you imagine, if it were not banned, and continued to receive 0.5 - 1.0M impressions, how different my sales would be, and what would the current user count be, compared to what it is today?

[nakata1609]

@Focia19 Here are some issues with the “hidden” discovery changes. The results are devastating, and the graphic should tell you when these discovery issues happen. Notice the drop starting to happen as soon as the first developer reports the discovery issue to the bug report.

My experience had been suffering from this change for two months. The shadow ban is apparent, as I had decent concurrent players for nearly a month with zero updates. When ROBLOX was back to work again yesterday, the shadow ban appeared to happen again. I need a fix for this as two months have cost me a lot of revenue and opportunities.

One more thing, I cannot search for my game name on ROBLOX. Searching Digital Monsters do not bring up the game at all. The game is locked to the keyword “Digimon.” This is clearly a search discovery bug, but I believe there are way more internal discovery issues that caused this.

The red highlight indicates when the shadowban may have happened or if anything went wrong with the discovery.