Reproduction Steps
go to https://www.roblox.com/home
Expected Behavior
i expect my game to show up in Continue and Friend Activity
games from the same group show up despite being Privated
Actual Behavior
my game doesn’t show up in Continue and Friend Activity
Issue Area: Roblox Website
Page URL: Roblox
Impact: Critical
Frequency: Constantly
Date First Experienced: 2022-10-28 00:10:00 (+07:00)
Date Last Experienced: 2022-10-28 00:10:00 (+07:00)
Game link
This is a very serious issue, my game Slither Simulator has been repeatedly shadow banned over the last few weeks, it coincides with a change to the game’s description, or even a change to some Translation text. If you recently updated your description, maybe try reverting those changes for now. I have messaged #bug-support directly about it, and when I did, my game got “fixed” but I never received any reply, which is unusual.
Please see this thread where it is documented and there you can see the crashes in traffic my game has experienced. Really sorry to hear this is happening to others too, we work hard to build up traffic to our games, only to have them disappear from Roblox discoverability, due to this glitch.
Thanks for the report! We’ll investigate.
Changing the game’s description has become a risk now, my game is facing a similar shadow-ban from the search results.
Before (Yesterday), the game used to rank 37th on the keyword “soccer”. But today, it is nowhere to be found even if you search the full name of the game and scroll all the way down:
This bug happened right when my daily new visitors has spiked up to new record of 4k new players (first-timers) a day which was due to the search engine and now the player count is going downhill fast as players can’t find the game anymore.
can i get an update on the situation please?
i want to release my game and fully advertise it, I’m already very behind schedule and it is affecting me very badly
This issue has also affected my game. A World Reborn no longer shows up in searches.
Hi! Can you please ask the engineers what happened to my game on the 3rd of january 2023, my game went from steady 300-500 players to 1 player and its completely shadowbanned, you cant search for it, see it on continued or anything! Game link: 💎BloxWorld⛏️ [Minecraft!] - Roblox
it’s devastating when this happens. confirmed your experience BloxWorld is shadow banned, not appearing in search for the exact name. i also played the game, and it does not appear in the continue list of my Roblox homepage.
my similar experiences are documented on this current thread and on this other one:
@Focia19 can you please help out this dev who’s gotten a similar ban as Slither Simulator?
@TheStealthyGoblin you can try updating your game’s title to add or remove a couple of random characters, to see if that can get you unbanned. If you wait it out, it might take 2 days or more to get a reply from Roblox support. It’s so hard for a game to recover from this kind of outage!
i was just asking if anyone found this creepy game that looks like something down below, the picture is creepy though
you even falsely tagged me and thinking that I needed help even though I was wondering if anyone found it because I thought the game got shadow-banned
@Focia19 my game Slither Simulator is shadow banned right now. Not appearing in search, continue, or friend activity, shortly after reaching a weekly high of concurrent users. Please unban it immediately. I’m attempting a self-fix of updating the title to include the snake emoji this time.
@Focia19 my game Slither Simulator received another shadow ban this evening.
It’s so sad. It hurts bad when this happens. I spent Robux on advertising to get to where I was. Then in 1 hour it is all taken away, and it never comes all the way back. @Focia19
1/13/2023
My Slither Simulator game got shadow banned today. Traffic crashed from 450 to 30 in 1 hour. Not findable in Search, Continue or Friend activity.
“hole” in my experience’s traffic at the time of the ban today.
UPDATE: 1/14/2023
Here today is another shadow ban on Slither Simulator
@Focia19 @KnightGaladeld
UPDATE 1/15/2023
Another shadow ban today
Apparently, the official guidelines says that there is a penalty up to 14 days whenever the game may have been added to the spam filter aka “shadowban”.
If the experience you published is not populating on discovery pages or search results, it may be due to the following:
When publishing a new experience, it can take multiple days to appear in content discovery.
The name or description violates our community standards, such as keyword spam. Ensure that your experience’s metadata follows our best practices. When updating your experience’s metadata, it may take up to 14 days for your experience to repopulate in discovery pages and search results.
Why does Roblox hate my game so much!?
Banned for the last 48 hours! @Focia19 I already contacted Roblox support, they did nothing!
Nobody ever told me anything is wrong with my game! Roblox just bans it every day and kills my traffic! If there’s something wrong with it, just tell me, and I will be happy to fix it!
Now there’s some impostor game with my same Icon that I made, same Title, same Description, and they stole all of my Thumbnails. It’s not banned while I am. When my customers search up my game, they get this impostor game, which is just a teleport to an obby. The real game got taken offline while Roblox allows this impostor to steal all my visitors and ruin my reputation.
Roblox platform has serious problems that makes spam games flourish while legit games are taken offline!
@thirdtakeonit Oct 22, 2022 you mentioned you would investigate. It’s now January 16, 2023. What did we find out since then? The behavior is the same now as it was 3 months ago
@xoroshoh you are in charge of Roblox S&D! @KnightGaladeld is there anyone at Roblox that you can ask to escalate this!?
@MisterGreenTurtle Theses are some of the hard evidence of the wacky discovery issue. It is definitely a real issues. Numbers do not lie. Please forward this to the engineer. It has been 3 months of hell
I was contacted by a Roblox engineer who said the issue with my game has been fixed, and was a problem due to a legacy system mistakenly banning my experience. They mentioned that my perseverance and frequent communication was helpful in resolving the issue!
All along, there was nothing wrong with my game Slither Simulator.
Thank you to everyone who has listened to me complain about this, and to those who supported me with likes on my posts, and thank you especially to those involved in implementing the solution.
@thirdtakeonit I noticed the game linked in the OP has been made private. Most likely this issue can now be closed, and we can move on to more creative uses of our time! Awesome!
Just wanted to close the loop with the community that we’ve investigated this and updated our banning system that could have caused such a problem. Thanks again for reporting the issue!
This has now just happened to my game ‘clicker ninja’ it’s two years old but we changed our name 2 days ago and it’s disappeared yesterday
Could it happen because someone botted your game from 08:00 to 10:00?
