Filtered Roblox Usernames makes it impossible to search for them

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

23 Likes

Search queries in general shouldn’t be censored, it’s ridiculous.

8 Likes

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, it’s still too restrictive.

3 Likes

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 “keyword” in the search bar, this could be abused by users to share URLs containing bad words that would be displayed on the website.

2 Likes

What purpose does filtering the searchbar serve in reality though?

It’s not like it’s 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 “apple_” would also match to and in turn show “apple_[swear]” in the results, despite the search being something innocent)

It’s not like it’s stopping users from seeing words/phrases they’re not meant to see either, because if they’re the ones typing it in they already know all of the content that’s being censored

Only Trust and Safety knows the answer to that. Likely it’s 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 Roblox’s fault for showing that to a 6 year old.

1 Like

Hello! I saw this issue and the other day I found a way to search with this. Simply do “@YasatoO”

Without “@”

With “@”

3 Likes

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:

1 Like

This has been going on for a long time.

My son’s username is not searchable (with or without the @) because it’s been 97gray97 since 2011. Obviously having a number at the beginning of your username wasn’t an issue back then. My old name was 69scott69, but for obvious reasons I decided to change it.
I couldn’t even put his name on my ‘About’ description for my account, but my daughter’s 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?

2 Likes

Seriously… my name is filtered when you search, “MasterXertz” because apparently “Xertz” is a filtered word. If you search it up, it just means, " To gulp a beverage down enthusiastically, heartily and quickly". I don’t see how that is bad.

Works fine for me

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.

3 Likes

Whoa, someone must’ve read it and whitelisted my name between when I wrote what I said and when you searched.

The term “xertz” is still filtered though… which people say when trying to talk to me.

1 Like

Thanks for reporting the issue, this should be fixed now.

3 Likes

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