Forum should support IPv6

Forum Help Forum Features
#1

I did make a post on IPv6 support on Roblox but that’s for the main website, servers, etc and I believe it’s important to point this out to the forum staff as I believe hosting the devforum is nothing like Roblox and the teams seem to be completely different.

Currently devforum.roblox.com is IPv4 only, with no support for IPv6. The IP is from Akamai which is like a hosting company, and as far as I know they do support IPv6, not sure about the exact service that the forum is using in it, but it should.

I believe it was disabled on purpose, and I would guess that’s because they don’t know how to deal with IPv6 networks (how to identify networks by its /64 and not just the IP). I have seen Discourse forums on IPv6, hell, meta.discourse.org is on IPv6, so it should be possible to put the DevForum on the IPv6 internet, and it will be required after a while.

Mobile carriers already on most places, are IPv6-first, and some are IPv6-only (with NAT64). Brazil carriers are all working on IPv6, and Vivo, is IPv6 only with NAT64.

Now, even deploying IPv6 here means deploying it on Roblox, and I’m not asking for full compatibility, I believe logging in wouldn’t work yet on truly IPv6-only networks because Roblox doesn’t support it, however it is still extremely important to get the forum to be as IPv6 ready as possible, and it, after logging in should work even on IPv6 only networks just fine.

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#2

Bold to assume they don’t know how to deal with IPv6, there are certainly good reasons why they’re not bothering with this right now, especially considering this is currently breaking nothing for anyone. What problem are you trying to solve with this feature request?

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#3

I don’t think it’s bold, it’s very common to see companies just not having people that do not know how to deal with IPv6. Another reason that I can think of them not enabling IPv6 is having to deal with the fact that they might have IP banned people and those IP bans aren’t valid in IPv6. I don’t think they do IP ban because IP banning is just not really something that works on IPv4 because a bunch of people on a bunch of ISPs are on CGNAT sharing the same IP address, therefore you’re not banning one person or one network, you’re banning possibly hundreds, maybe more.

I believe it might be a compatibility issue with some plugin they have, I have no idea, however it is important to either modify that possibly broken plugin to get it to work as fast as possible, there are many reasons to deploy IPv6.

This isn’t necessarily true, there are users in certain countries, I believe India has this issue, where IPv4 is just way more scarce and so they have to deal with overshared public IP addresses and usually that connection, that IPv4 link is extremely slow, a lot of times unavailable, and basically unusable, it’s just a backup to legacy services.
As someone from North America, you don’t get hurt by legacy IP scarcity as much as well, everyone else. North America has a lot of IPv4 addresses, the rest don’t. It’s easy to overlook IP scarcity when you’re not being hurt by it.

Performance issues with people on certain ISPs that are on just overshared CGNAT, and also, it’s future proofing. Well we don’t actually have any IPv4 left, so it’s more so a present issue that people from certain areas don’t have an issue with and so just invalidate the entire discussion when there are many people not able to use the internet properly because of it.

Switching to IPv6 is just harder the longer it takes. It has been noticed to many people that working with IPv4-only leads to the use of software, or hardware that isn’t IPv6 supported and will sabotage the person working with it once deployment is bigger and now they have all this cost, sometimes in terms of money, or time, to switch out everything for it to work. That is why it’s important to support it sooner rather than later.

IPv6 is inevitable. Supporting it is easier sooner rather than later.

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#4

those IP bans aren’t valid in IPv6

You don’t have to always ban by the full IPv6 address since the other end can be user-changed anyway. There’s a better way called “prefix banning” which bans the first section of an IPv6 address called “prefix”, usually it’s between /56 and /64 for most home networks. Even with the similar risk as IPv4 banning but way better since NAT is discouraged in IPv6 anyway.

I don’t think they do IP ban because IP banning is just not really something that works on IPv4 because a bunch of people on a bunch of ISPs are on CGNAT sharing the same IP address.

Unfortunately Roblox did some automated IP bans since few years ago:

Performance issues with people on certain ISPs that are on just overshared CGNAT, and also, it’s future proofing.

Not just that, but some ISPs already went far enough to completely disable IPv4 and use a translation layer called NAT64 to connect between IPv4-only hosts. The experience feels like CG-NAT but a bit worse, especially for sites/programs that make any use of plain “IPv4 literal” addresses to work.

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