This issue seems to occour for a few months but since it happened again i decided to bug report this. Recently i had over 700+ friend requests but as of today the number has shrinked to “469”:
It seems like friend requests randomly disappear sometimes without noticing. As this seems to be a Roblox issue, i am unable to provide further info as of now. This probably happens to alot of people but they might not notice as the friend requests increase too fast or if it just shows “500+”
I am actively loosing friend requests at the moment:
Yeah, it decreased rapidly a few months ago, and since then has very slowly decreased. I used to have 500+ and now have only 19. Though, 99% of them were bots that added me several years ago so it hasnt really affected me.
The bulk disappearance of friend requests is most likely not a bug. Applications like Discord also routinely clear out very old DM requests and friend requests, and this behavior can be observed across many other popular platforms as well.
The intention might be to prevent requests from remaining in a pending state indefinitely — either you accept or reject them. If a staff member could confirm whether this is intended behavior, that would be helpful.
If somehow this is a newly added ‘feature’, then there’s again a clear lack of communication & transparency.
If around January this year they had announced how friend requests would decay or expire after a period (let’s say x-hundred days*) it would be a lot more clear.
In that week’s update announcement recap, only the increased friend amount is mentioned
Whether it’s even tied to this update in the first place is also unclear
Instead what is happening is that friend requests are seemingly disappearing out of nowhere and leave users guessing what’s going on, as I’ve never seen or had this happen prior to around that January.
Aside from it being in random waves – early to mid March has been very calm, whereas this April it’s picked up again – that wouldn’t correspond to a proper set expiration time, the most peculiar aspect seems to be the arbitrary selection of which request disappears and when.
I’ve logged these a bunch in an initial post Player friend requests disappearing? and even today, with around 150 - 200 requests gone, there’s still ones at the end that have lasted for longer than those 150 - 200 that have disappeared since-
*Thanks to the feature added to ‘newer’ requests which tells you where/from what game or experience the request was sent from, it’s safe to conclude they last at least a year as I haven’t touched these games since last year’s The Hunt event (mar13-apr4, 2024)
Again no transparency. Not that they’re de jure obligated to, but surely it’s a change worth mentioning. Especially when it affects users on the front end to where it’s clearly noticeable, as proven by our reports.
Just an "Additionally, pending friend requests will now expire after a period of … days to prevent […]" as a bullet point would have sufficed and made this clear.
Though again I must note, it’s not even clear if this is related to the friend limit increase update and if these random waves of randomly picked friend requests that disappear are intentional in the first place
Hi folks, thanks for the report and apologies for the confusion. Roblox has long had a policy of removing Friend Requests older than 2 years. Unfortunately, the system that enforced this was partially broken for about 2 years, meaning friend requests up to ~4 years old were often sticking around. Over the last few months, we redesigned that system, gradually cleaned up old friend requests in batches, and are now back to properly enforcing the 2 year friend request time-to-live.
Glad to at last hear some official insights on what’s been happening. As pointed out however, there’s no indication of this system anywhere for users to see.
It (or rather the fix/reintroduction) can’t be found under the update announcement recaps and isn’t mentioned on the https://en.help.roblox.com/hc/en-us/articles/203313580-How-to-Make-Friends help article either.
It wouldn’t hurt mentioning this, even if it’s in a small additional italics note below, similar to the ‘polite notifying message’ one (not sure how you’re supposed to message someone who isn’t your friend though)
Or perhaps even a small mention of it on the actual friend request page, how pending requests will expire after 2 years.
Either will make it more clear for everyone why this number is suddenly decreasing.
PS I’ll assume that certain requests disappearing before others, despite them being more recent, are some teething problems that will be properly linear over time
Friend requests being removed after 2 years is honestly too pointless and irrelevant to be in a help article — especially when the article is about super basic stuff like ‘How do I ask someone to be my friend?’, ‘What happens after I send my request?’, ‘How do I check my friend requests?’, ‘How do I delete friends?’, ‘What do friends do?’ Like, someone who actually needs that article probably won’t even care about something that technical, so there’s really no point in mentioning it.
But more importantly, you were supposed to use #feature-requests for that in the first place.
Yes, that’s why it shouldn’t be its own paragraph. There’s many small extra bits and even an additional note (as I’ve pointed out). It perfectly amongst those or the request tab perfectly.
You personally deem it too uninteresting, yet you’re suggesting me to go the circuitous route in making this a whole ‘feature request’
It’s just a small clearing that can be added without much endeavor.
