I’m very confused on this one. All decals/images in general uploaded to Roblox have to go through moderation - This is one of the fundamentals of ROBLOX user-uploaded images, as far as I’m aware.
But. In my game, where players can put down paintings which they can populate with any Decal/image ID, I’ve found that around once a day or two minimum there will be images displayed with Straight up nudity. I’m not going to go into more detail because any description more graphic would simply end up moderated in itself; Point is, pretty bad stuff.
Has anyone else had this issue? Did you just have to implement your own moderation for this issue? I know robox mods might get tired but the fact that you can pull NSFW content directly from the website is rather terrifying.
You’ve discovered bypasses. They’re not fun. This is why most games do not have a mechanic to insert your own decals, because they are free and too easily bypassed by people who can cheat the system. Before the audio update, the same problem existed, but since what you can hear is less damaging than what you can see more games had radios.
Is it possible to change your game to use a preset list of decals? If you’re getting someone doing this every day then your game is sort of a hotspot. The best way to stop them is probably to not allow them to use their own images.
What is the bypass being done here, exactly? This seems like something Roblox needs to fix on their end, I’m just getting asset IDs. That means somewhere out there this asset is perfectly uploaded to roblox, viewable by a lot more than just me, surely?
I believe they typically trick the bot, there’s no hacking or anything going on. For example, slightly blurring the picture or adding random flashes of color that wouldn’t really be noticeable by a human but would distract a bot. Roblox has said themselves that they use bots to determine if something is acceptable. If the bot never flags something for a human to view, the asset will just upload with no issues.
Congrats! Your first disgusting people to join the game! LOL, in all seriousness, this is pretty normal, its bypassed images. I would include a report button, to report the player + the asset. Ex. Click report to view player username + decal id and report both of them. Plus, when reported, the image will not show anymore.
Your not alone, booth plaza, rate my avatar etc has these same issues. Try what i said above. They bypass by as @TyScripts has said, tricking the bot. You need some moderation for your game as well. Hire mods and give them the power, if trustworthy enough to hold the power responsibly, to remove images and ban players from the game.
It matters, but not really.
If it’s a shirt, it’ll get taken down usually before 10 sales.
If it’s a decal, no big DEVs will use it, if players decides to use the decal code in game they’ll just ruin 1 server, which is also not a big deal.
If it’s a game then there’s no way anyones gonna spend 100K to get it popular then instantly banned.
A lot of games deal with this on a daily basis. You can try adding a user vote-kick option so that users can vote-kick others if they are posting inappropriate images.
This is what you call bypassed decals. I’ve known people that have made inappropriate t-shirts and decals. There is basically nothing to do about this except just deleting the ability to place decals at all.
Yes, I know many of you know the game Starving artists and how there is literally no moderation on that game whatsoever. I feel that images should be placed in a queue until they can get accepted by a moderator of that game / etc. Partially, this is Roblox’s fault as well. Say you upload a QR code that has a shady link attached to it, that can still get past moderation as it has before.
I’d just like to point out that you’ve misrepresented how Roblox employs automation in moderation pipelines and it’s dangerous to spread misinformation. Please do make sure you have a sufficient understanding of how it’s explained before asserting it as true.
Roblox uses automation purely for prescreening content (e.g. hash checks, internal flags). No sort of automation is allowed to approve or reject content to the site on its own; all decisions are actioned on by human moderators. The bypasses in question change the composition of the image so that it will only display the inappropriate content under certain conditions (e.g. brightened, plastered on a dark background, resized). It’s a trick on human moderators, not automation.
To the OP though, yeah, I’ve also been having trouble with inappropriate content and I’ve likewise been having trouble reporting it. There’s still some assets uploaded from last year that are still on the site and it’s troubling when wanting to support UGC features. I do hope that the asset permissions update originally applied to audio will have some influence on changing this behaviour as the inappropriate content will need to be public to be used anywhere; if not, then the audience is reduced purely to those who’ve obtained a link to the content.
This just makes me think of pure incompetence on ROBLOX’s end though - Considering many of these decals being used in my game have a white background or take up so much of the screen there is no way they could have gotten through.
Thanks for confirming manual moderation though - I recalled vaguely that all decals went through hand moderation, but honestly, the fact this stuff still gets through is embarrassing. I was more willing to believe it was just broken auto-mod rather than literal people accepting booba decals. Oof.
I should not be required to spend time re-moderating what roblox has already moderated - by hand.
The rarer the occurance the better.
Usually most people don’t bother / don’t know what ID’s are used for so they’ll think that the dev did something nasty. I know… players are weird sometimes! It’s Roblox’s fault, but you can’t rely on them fixing it. You should definitely make a system where some trustworthy mods meet up in a let’s say Discord server and monitor people’s behavior.
My eiteration would be having a vote system where every mod can vote on a report case filed by some player. If the punish votes reach a threshold like 2-3 or the punish votes are 2-3 more than the not punish votes then your system takes automatic action and bans the decal ID from being used and punishes the player that was reported using it. Otherwise case dismissed in a week.
This requires a decent amount of community connection, at least 5 very active mods and for some cases isn’t worth doing compared to what you get in return. If you care about the players that quit because the lack of moderation and about your community being healthy more than caring about the money earned then it’s totally a feature to develop.
Note: make sure not to make it a backfiring plan by giving your mods enough powers to single-handedly ruin your community. Instead of kicking or banning people the punishment should be prevention from using a feature.
I don’t know the particular internal policies or tools used when it comes to image moderation so I wouldn’t be too quick to chalk it up to incompetence on their part, but maybe it is - and a lack of tooling or adapting to whatever methods bad faith actors are using to get this content through.
I wholeheartedly agree though, it is entirely frustrating that we need to spend time adding safeguards or just removing a venue of customisation entirely because some people can’t control themselves. In turn, with inappropriate decals running rampant and existing customisation features, Roblox holds the developer responsible for ensuring these venues don’t get abused, so it alone is a ban risk to allow player-input for decals if inappropriate content is consistently shown by the experience’s community.
Really holding out for decal permissions, it won’t nip the bud regarding content getting uploaded but it should help when it comes to preventing their rendering in-game. All that’d be left then is classic shirts which also… face the same problem.
When it comes to this it’s hard not to - Decals like stated before in this thread are hand-approved typically, and the images I get aren’t masked or hidden in any way that might trick someone with a background. It seems to defeat the entire point of the long moderation times decals tend to have if they aren’t 100% accurate from the by-hand moderation.
Currently, players in my game are able to put down paintings with decals - This is one of the only real profit generators of my game, so I’d hate to remove them, though I might have to, considering I’ve gotten literal booba on more than one occasion.