We are actively reviewing today’s incident, which involved plugin creators receiving incorrect moderation actions. We truly apologize for the inconvenience and our moderation team is actively working to undo any accounts that were incorrectly moderated. We’re also reviewing internal procedures regarding this to ensure that this does not occur again in the future.
FOR THOSE IMPACTED:
If your account is not unbanned by 8PM Pacific Time on Sunday, February 11th: Please submit an appeals ticket here: Roblox Support and select the “Moderation” and “Appeal Account or Content” section and the moderation team will work with you to have the moderation action reverted. Please make sure to include the following:
Put the words “Plugin Creator Issue” at the beginning of your appeal
Your username
Links to any groups or lost content
Link to the moderated plugin (if you have it)
If you require additional followup, please do not hesitate to contact Developer Relations at devrelations@roblox.com. However, please contact Roblox support first, so that they can more expediently assist you.
Our priority at this time is ensuring all of the impacted developers have received help from us. Additionally, Developer Relations will be working with other teams internally to better understand why this happened and how we can ensure that it does not happen again. There will be more information posted as a response to this.
Note: This thread will be updated with more information in the future.
Important note: None of the moderation action that transpired during this situation (specifically, ONLY moderation action related to the situation with Plugins on February 11th, 2018) will impact any of the affected users’ ability to participate in the Developer Exchange program.
To reiterate, those who were mistakenly punished over Plugins on February 11th, 2018, specifically from this situation, will not have their ability to DevEx impacted by this specific moderation action.
Additionally, in the cases of moderation history review for Developer Forum entry and Roblox Developer Conference invitations, the reviewers will not count moderation actions specifically from this Plugin situation against users.
We apologize for the issues caused by this incident and thank you for your patience while waiting for a response from us.
Here is a recap of what occurred on Sunday, February 11th, 2018:
Unfortunately due to internal process issues, this issue occurred as a result of cascading issues triggered from a request to remove copies of a malicious plugins in the Roblox catalog. This resulted in many plugins being erroneously removed, and associated developers being banned or terminated. In some cases where developers who were terminated were also group owners this resulted in games being open for any group member to take over.
As soon as Roblox discovered this issue on Sunday we took immediate and corrective actions to revert the bans and terminations of developers as well as restoring plugins. However we were not able to appropriately restore plugin names and descriptions which we have asked developers to manually set back. We also discovered the group issue after these corrective actions but we have since restored group owners and any Robux related to the incident.
Internally, we had numerous discussions to learn from these issues and put in new processes and systems to avoid this in the future.
Here is a quick summary of how Roblox is actively reviewing this incident:
Internal teams have been actively reviewing current processes and proposing changes as needed in order to add safeguards to prevent this from occurring in the future.
Reviewing our internal tools to assess improvements that could have made it easier for us to help the impacted developers.
Reviewing developer features that could have helped out developers.
As many of you highlighted during the incident, the way that permanently banned accounts lose ownership of groups is a negative experience for developers on our platform. How is Roblox going to improve this behavior?
Current: When a user is permanently banned, the user automatically abandoned all groups they owned. A random user in the group could claim ownership of the group.
New behavior [LIVE] When a user is permanently banned, the user keeps ownership of the group. If a player believes their account was incorrectly terminated they can submit an appeal through the appeals process without losing the group. We are currently reviewing other ways this behavior will work in the future.
As previously noted, please make sure to follow the steps recommended below if you need help from us if you were impacted by this issue.
This thread will be updated once the new group behavior goes live next week.