False Positive Text Chat Suspension for Command-Like Message

[Awo_kein]

I received a 5-minute chat suspension and warning for sending the following message in a Roblox game:

/unban 907417649

This message was flagged for “breaking the rules,” but it is a non-abusive, non-offensive command directed at a game system (a developer-created command intended for moderation). This resulted in an automatic temporary mute and a warning stating that repeated behavior may lead to account restrictions.

Issue:

• The chat moderation system incorrectly flagged a harmless, functional command as a rule violation.
• There was no inappropriate, offensive, or disrespectful content in the message.
• This action limits legitimate interactions in our game, preventing our staff team from doing their work.

Evidence:

Attached are screenshots showing:

1. The message that triggered the suspension
2. The warning and suspension notices
3. The 5-minute mute timer

Requested Action:

• Review and adjust moderation filters to better recognize command-style messages that are not harmful.
• Reclassify messages like “/unban [userID]” to avoid false positives in moderation.
• Revoke the warning from my account as it was incorrectly issued.

Attachments:

[Tomi1231 (Chilly28)]

Slightly off topic, but I wonder how chat moderation works for custom chats. Custom chats have full control over what a “player” sends to the chat (when TextChannel:SendAsync() is called), so either malicious developers can create games that purposefully make players send bad messages to get them banned, or calls to TextChannel:SendAsync() that don’t come from the default TextChatService corescript aren’t taken into account for the automatic moderation?

Either way, roblox really need to step up their game with moderation. Their automatic moderation system has been failing them for many years. It kind of seems like roblox is making their moderation more strict to fight against the reports of unsafety of the platform, but then cause a lot of false positives

[Sylmat]

Yep Roblox moderation has become worse and worse over the years and seemingly on purpose. I remember back in my days ( around 2009-12) the tags were non-existent and people were amazing

No game, NO GAME, enforce such a bad automatic chat moderation that can lead to automatic, unsupervised, ban and all the games have a nice community of people that communicate and behave properly.

For example League of Legends will auto-mute you for hate speech and racial slurs (and other severe profanities) and delete the message for the duration of the game, but will never automatically ban without a HUMAN interaction and requires a player report, which is how it should be.

Roblox makes these filters for the 1% of extremist players that exists just to insult and ruin it for all the others… (which they find ways around and do it on an alt anyways!)
* To give an example, the other day I said “oh” and it tagged it, like what?

These 1% of extremist exist in all games, but when and if properly handled, they are not a problem.

Now I know Roblox is also made for young kids, but imo it comes down to parental control and restrictions, such as options for removing chat completely or forcing chat filtering with tags. (Option without tags should be a possibility, in my case I don’t really care for swears or anything, I would like to see them, filter chat for those who wants it to be filtered)

Basically, so much of Roblox resources are wasted on wrongful moderation/appeal tickets*, so if the only (or most) tickets they had to handle were actual reports, it’d be so much more efficient
* Personally I had to open about 10 to revert one moderation, which im not even sure it has been because of the bots handling appeals

Anways I realize that I went way off topic writing this and replying to Chilly, but it has to be said. Moderation is currently outrageous.

[raskolibov (Yavuz)]

@Awo_kein

/unban 907417649

Okay, but why do you type commands in the chat? Commands aren’t really part of chatting, so um, I think they’re in the right for that (I’m ready to do my best to prove Roblox right).

And also, there’s a section below for feedback, so maybe just use that? Like it says, “Did we make a mistake? Let us know,” so you can click on that and send it instead of filing a whole bug report here, and most likely any improvements or changes happen through that tool…

@Awo_kein

@Sylmat

around 2009-12

HOLY UNC I was just a baby back then

[be_nj (benjj)]

Hey, thanks for reaching out. It appears that your command is being processed by the TextFilter which may consider that string of numbers to be information that shouldnt be shared.

In general, it’s preferable to process messages for command processing with a TextChatCommand instance to avoid this particular issue. It looks like this message is not intended to be shared with others.

Is something preventing you from adopting TextChatCommands for this usecase?