Get rid of the chat filter in the Talent Hub

I agree. I don’t see why the Talent Hub would need one, especially if Roblox is wanting developers to communicate within the Talent hub instead of 3rd party sites (although this is still allowed but you must establish communication in the Talent Hub before moving to Discord or other 3rd party sites)

If the reasoning behind the chat filter is because of <13’s, that is honestly quite stupid as most <13’s are not developers.

As others in this thread have stated, the DevForum does not have a filter and the Talent Hub is meant to be a replacement for the collaboration category, which makes the filter even more stupid because at this point I would rather just use the collaboration categories for work instead of the Talent Hub due to it being much easier to get people to just add me on Discord and I would also not need to worry about my post being unreadable because of parts of it being censored.

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Doesn’t make a lot of sense to have a chat filter on it. I would think it’s reasonable if it’s blocking things such as profanity or sexual terms.

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Yes but they only filter the 1 on 1 chat and not the actual posts that people will be looking at and this is both weird and bad.

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They must be a DevForum member which means they must be 13+

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They need the chat filter because on the official announcements page they announced that there will be some settings enabled for people under 13 so that they can have a secure (or tagged af) time on the Talent Hub.

Whatever, the Talent Hub should be strictly made 13+ and the chat filter MUST be removed. Are you underaged? Your headache, cry about it.

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Hello all!

Thank you for providing feedback on Talent Hub, we really appreciate it. It’s this sort of feedback that helps ensure we can provide the best possible product to everyone.

Wanted to shed a bit of context first -

When we struck out to build Talent Hub, we wanted to explore how we could improve the Collaboration board in every possible way. This includes the obvious such as the ability to search and filter to find the right job, to mechanisms to help generate some initial trust between users. It also includes safety and moderation - something that is super important to Roblox.

This is why we have launched with a dedicated human moderation team that reviews everything, along with text filters in Application chat. We hope that these two mechanisms will keep everyone safe. Having said that, we’re also aware the text filters in their current form are a bit too restrictive for the kinds of conversation that are being had on Talent Hub.

Additionally, Talent Hub is fundamentally a matchmaking site - we help Job seekers find Job posters. It is not a collaboration platform; what I mean by this, is that once two people have decided to work together, the expectation is that they take their communication elsewhere.

For launch, our workaround has been to allow Discord usernames through the text filter, so that people can take it off-platform once they’ve decided to work together. You should find that in your applications today, you can talk more freely about Discord than you would normally be able to in a game chat.

Longer-term, we are pushing towards a text filter that is more customized and specific to Talent Hub’s context; one that blocks abuse, but allows people to freely talk business.

I hope that sheds some like on our approach, would be great to hear additional thoughts around:

  1. Do we need to be clearer around the fact that Discord is allowed, and does this start to solve the problem in your eyes?
  2. Specifically what messages or phrases are getting filtered that are blocking you?

Excited to talk about this further!

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Many job posters and job seekers don’t have Discord (as the minimum age can be up to 16 in some countries) this means that the Talent Hub becomes a platform for job posters / seekers who have Discord, rather than a platform for all job posters / seekers.

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In these cases what platform would you expect collaborators to use instead, in your experience? Of course, DevForum PMs are also a backup that would be totally allowed here as it’s still part of Roblox.

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I, as many others would also probably agree, truly appreciate all the efforts the team behind the Talent Hub is doing for the betterment of the platform and collaboration as a whole.

However, the text filter as it is right now, specially if it is using Roblox’s chat filter known specifically for how restrictive it is, completely blocks the ability to communicate with applicants and those offering the jobs.

Would it be possible to implement the ability to disable the filter locally? There are way too many false positives at the moment and unfortunately, due to experience, I don’t believe it will improve much over the following months.

More specifically, mentioning Discord does not work right now. It gets censored every time I try mention it, plus phrases such as “Hey! Thank you for applying! Please send a fr to the following tag: Name#1234” do not work. Even mentioning specifically discord, e.g. “Hey! Please DM us through our discord tag.” does not work, instead tagging the entire sentence.

If these can be fixed, but the chat filter doesn’t become optional, I will probably have to entirely rely on Discord for communication, as right now the filter is way too restrictive.

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Talent Hub is currently extremely underbaked and frustrating to use. So many web elements are either rushed or poorly thought out, such as being forced to click the Message chatbar in order to begin typing (for every single message you send, because it always loses focus of the text box once you send a message!), or there being multiple nested scrolling windows such as in the main jobs search page (I found myself accidentally scrolling down the main website and not the jobs listing frame on accident numerous times, which would result in stuff being cut off from your screen.

Information is spread out uncomfortably wide, and finding people of certain skills is very time consuming and actually worse than the devforum collab section!!! worse!!!

Here’s why:
The website design encourages people to slap on basically every single skill tag on themselves. It’s like, hmm, I did build one little model a few years ago, guess I should put on the “Builder” tag even though I am a scripter by trade! Oh yeah, I also use social media! So that means I should have the “Social media” tag! Also, I definitely do business! +“Business” tag. – This results in a situation where no matter what key word you specify in your search, you basically end up looking at like 50-80% of all users on the site.

If half of all people who have the “modeler” tag aren’t actually looking for modeling positions and just simply have that tag because they approached the tag system like a resume (which is perfectly reasonable), then you end up with a situation where it is impossible to narrow down your search.

Also, to name a few other key ways in which Talent Hub is a notable and massive downgrade to using the devforums, would be things like the above mentioned chat filter, not being able to embed pictures in the website, and limited character space in many of the fields which acts as a deterrent for the user to share any meaningful level of information about themselves, furthering the problem of profiles telling absolutely nothing about someone’s skill level until you go click off the website to a bunch of links of past works (which often involves having to boot up the Roblox client and hop into games, because pictures are so de-emphasized in the Talent Hub).

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Maybe making the filter less aggressive and adding a report system (such as the one on the forum)

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I believe emails are one way that collaborators communicate through if they don’t use Discord (however there is a problem with this and that’s that this is not moderated, due to emails being moderators).

An alternative are video calling platforms (such as Zoom).

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I would expect DevForum PM’s, as I can’t think of any other platform.

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If they add a chat filter in devforum im moving to scratch games, I am very serious.

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I feel like this should have been in place from the start, even if it meant delaying the launch of the Talent Hub. You have a pretty nice looking chat system for applications, but then you officially encourage off-site communication? By doing this, you are kind of saying you don’t care that much if a user is safe, just that the unsafe things don’t happen on-platform.

Allowing Discord doesn’t solve anything. I know too many good developers including myself that don’t use Discord/aren’t allowed to (surprise: being 13+ doesn’t mean you don’t have parents!) but Roblox has always been seen as a safe platform for communication.

I do agree that there should be a filter in place, but at the same time, the DevForum doesn’t have one, so what, really, is the difference? If you insist on a filter, my suggestion is that it just block (all) language, inappropriate messages, etc. if people bypass it because it’s weaker, people can always report.

Currently the best solution is DevForum, but I’m interested to see what Guilded is like in the future. Currently it’s so similar to Discord there’s no way I’m allowed to use it, but that could change in the future. However, if not much changes about it, forcing users to contact through Discord or Guilded would just block developers, not help them.

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If a handful of developers voluntarily choose to not use discord, that is on them. If they “aren’t allowed to” use discord, that is also on them, and makes no sense if they’re allowed to use the devforum, in certain aspects they really aren’t different, there isn’t anything discord has in particular that would make parents (nobody said 13+ meant not having parents!) not want their children to use it that the devforum also wouldn’t have. Roblox shouldn’t not allow discord/guilded just to please a negligible minority, it hurts the majority. As a developer, switching back from discord to devforum PM/email is very painful, and to make matters worse, the non real time aspect of those two makes communication even more painful.

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I have two questions:

  1. It will not ‘keep everyones safe’
    If we can talk on discord, It is not safe at all. discord doesnt have any filter. then, why not just delete talent hub’s filter?

  2. If discord is main chat application, Why talent hub has chat feature?
    Why talent hub’s profile system does not have the discord linking system?
    You can just remove chat from talent hub and just send discord username and tags linked to profile when someone wants to be hired, right?

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I just ran into this filter and was unable to send a message that contained the last 4 numbers of my Discord handle several times. Had to eventually just reply to the person telling them to contact me in a different way… not the best experience, and definitely made for an awkward first conversation.

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I assume they mean people can choose not to engage in a Discord convo with the person. That’s the safety part. You speak in a controlled environment and then you can choose to go with a less controlled / safe platform.

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If I got that right, do you mean that the Devforum is just as “secure” as Discord? I can’t agree with you, because there are moderators in the Devforum who also react to rule violations. In addition, there is the fact that Discord has a voice chat function. So your quote “they aren’t allowed to have Discord” has two sides. On the one hand, the parents’ side, which I had to listen to for hours about dangers on the Internet, and then the lawl regulations. Here is an excerpt: https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/1500000159622-Why-Is-Discord-Asking-For-My-Birthday-

I hope you understand me, but there is a lot of dichotomy between rules and the law. The fact is: some parents think it’s okay, others don’t.

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