Lately over the past few years, the ROBLOX clothing avatar shop has been completely overrun by copy and pasted spam clothing. It has become almost impossible to find what you are looking for in the Avatar Shop.
For example, I wanted to find a shirt that would look great on a zombie character. I went to the Avatar Shop and searched “Zombie”. For 17 straight pages this was the only result:
The issue here is evident. The clothing avatar shop has been completely dominated by parasitic copied and pasted clothing.
There are obviously two methods players are using to abuse the description and title to promote their spammed items:
1) Titles are being spammed with the same word over and over to abuse the relevancy algorithm
2) Descriptions are spammed with random words to also abuse the relevancy algorithm.
For example, here is the long-abused tag spam method. This is for a zombie shirt…
This issue has existed on ROBLOX for many years, but lately it has become so bad that the Avatar Shop, for the most part, is completely useless at this point for clothing.
There should be no reason to have to go through a 17 page spam barrier before (maybe) finally getting to unique clothing.
As for solutions, ideas I thought of:
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Filter and flag titles that overuse a word multiple times (for ex. if a title contains ‘ZOMBIE’ three times… it’s probably being used to abuse the system and the title should be auto-deleted.)
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Remove descriptions of clothing and instead allow creators to link the matching pants/shirt in some sort of way (similar to how games have social links).
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Currently, players are rewarded with top-page promotion by abusing the system. This makes it so hard for designers who are morally grounded, make original clothing, and don’t resort to abusing the system. The Avatar Shop system should be functioning to motivate designers to innovate and be original. The players/group who are caught spamming with some sort of auto-moderation in place should have their clothes stripped from being presented when a player is sorting by relevancy or by a category. Instead of giving incentives to spam, there should be consequences to spam. By removing a players/group’s ability to represent their clothing on the Avatar Shop (which could be done automatically), you’re both encouraging original, innovated clothing as well as structuring the avatar shop to showcase only trusted/good quality content.
Very few times is the description actually used to explain the shirt/pants/t-shirt/etc. It is usually used to spam tags to promote the asset in irrelevant search topics. Instead, social links can be added if the creator wants to link their group or the matching article of clothing.
Regardless, this is a problem that has been getting especially out of hand over the past year or so that affects everyone on the platform. I really hope this will help push for action to finally end it.
If you have an idea as well, feel free to leave it below.
Thank you.