Currently I have a system in my game where I can enter text and it gets sent to all servers (for announcements). It does both a client and server-side check to make sure the player sending it has my UserId. I have text filtering as part of it, but it blocks a lot of text. My question is, given the fact I made it so only I can use this feature, do I still have to filter text?
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Any input by you or another player that is visible to other players must be filtered. If you send this message and any other players are seeing it (considering it’s an announcement I would assume other players can see it), it needs to be filtered.
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Even though this is pretty vague in which filtering takes place, I assume that it is still a requirement by referring to the Terms & Service. In past occurrences, it was a moderate-able offence, however an example is this custom chat systems. Thus meaning that everything which can be seen must be filtered.
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Despite this, I’m not sure if developer-sent non-chat messages made through developer-only backend systems are technically against the filtering rules. I figure that if you can, for example, only send these announcements through the developer console and you only use them for actual announcements, then you may be in the clear.
In this situation, your announcements are practically game content, and if your announcements break the rules or are inappropriate then your whole game can be taken down! Sending an announcement like this is not much different from publishing a new version with the given announcement.
Understand that I can’t find any rules confirming this, and if you choose to make unfiltered announcements then you may be breaking the rules. “You may be in the clear” is only my opinion!
If you can send these messages through a UI, then I’d keep filtering on to be safe. A good, safe compromise is to have a lot of pre-made announcements you can put out at any time so that announcements are technically part of your game content and don’t need to be filtered.
Don’t take my word on this. Use your best judgement. I’ve given you what the rules actually say; the rest is just my opinion.
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Thanks, I mainly use it to alert people of upcoming updates and shutdowns and possible datastore outages, so the pre-written announcements are a good compromise.
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