Reproduction Steps
1. Go to the main website page,
2. Go to the search bar
3. Search for the user: yasatoo
[Me typing in the username]
[After searching the username]
[this is a real existing account]
Expected Behavior
Website shows me list of all roblox accounts with similar names
Actual Behavior
The name gets filtered and it instead just shows no results
Issue Area: Roblox Website
Page URL: https://www.roblox.com
Impact: High
Frequency: Constantly
Search queries in general shouldnât be censored, itâs ridiculous.
This in place to prevent people from finding accounts with bypassed usernames AFAIK. There are different levels of filtering for different accounts, it would be nice if 18+ users could search with a less restrictive filter. If this is already what happens, itâs still too restrictive.
I believe that the search bar has the filter applied to it due to how the search API works. As you can see here this is the URL used by the website to search for a user: https://www.roblox.com/search/users?keyword=username and since the website displays the content of the query param âkeywordâ in the search bar, this could be abused by users to share URLs containing bad words that would be displayed on the website.
What purpose does filtering the searchbar serve in reality though?
Itâs not like itâs stopping users from finding inappropriate content, because usually inappropriate content has innocent or unrelated names, and on the rare times they do have inappropriate names you can still search for other things to find them (eg looking for âapple_â would also match to and in turn show âapple_[swear]â in the results, despite the search being something innocent)
Itâs not like itâs stopping users from seeing words/phrases theyâre not meant to see either, because if theyâre the ones typing it in they already know all of the content thatâs being censored
Only Trust and Safety knows the answer to that. Likely itâs just an overabundance of caution. If a 6 year old searches for something inappropriate and they get a bunch of inappropriate results (possibly more inappropriate than the query), parents, the general public, COPPA, and the media especially, does not care if it was the user that searched for that, it is Robloxâs fault for showing that to a 6 year old.
Hello! I saw this issue and the other day I found a way to search with this. Simply do â@YasatoOâ
Without â@â
With â@â
This is also an issue when searching for legitimate usernames which contain a sequence of digits. It seems the digits are moderated as a phone number. But in the case of a username, these should never be moderated for digits when searching! I noticed that some Exploiters have figured out that they cannot easily be found if they have this kind of username! So this is also a security issue! If it is going to be moderated in search, then these types of usernames should be forbidden on the Signup form!
Example search:
This has been going on for a long time.
My sonâs username is not searchable (with or without the @) because itâs been 97gray97 since 2011. Obviously having a number at the beginning of your username wasnât an issue back then. My old name was 69scott69, but for obvious reasons I decided to change it.
I couldnât even put his name on my âAboutâ description for my account, but my daughterâs name Mackenzie666 still shows.
How difficult is it to design an AI to look at a number/letter username and figure out if the number is anything other than just a number?
Seriously⌠my name is filtered when you search, âMasterXertzâ because apparently âXertzâ is a filtered word. If you search it up, it just means, " To gulp a beverage down enthusiastically, heartily and quickly". I donât see how that is bad.
This happens for me too,
If you try to search: shilowrld, it gets filtered, probably about time to change it again.
Thanks for the report. The issue is being investigated.
Whoa, someone mustâve read it and whitelisted my name between when I wrote what I said and when you searched.
The term âxertzâ is still filtered though⌠which people say when trying to talk to me.
Thanks for reporting the issue, this should be fixed now.
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