I just wanted to address an issue that is now prevalent amongst the Roblox C&G Community. Lately, there has been cases of individuals “botting” groups.
What does it mean to “bot” a group?
When an individual “bots” a group, it means that someone (it only takes an individual to do this) floods a group with alts, created instantly. Usually a group is botted then sold as a “superclan” to individuals (which is against the rules), which is how the entire botting issue spawned in the first place.
Since I have no sound evidence of how the entire process works, I must go by popular word of mouth. According to almost all of my contacts, bots are created instantly after a certain “script” is ran. My assumption is that all you must do is insert a groupID into the program or script, and it creates random accounts instantly, to flood said group. So, account creation is most likely the case that needs to be fixed here (or edited/reformed).
What do you propose we do about this?
Personally, I have no experience as a programmer, scripter, or coder. However I have known websites that experience the same problem, and I am going to assume this is a simple fix for the problem; I’m not a robot. I am quite unsure of how the entire process works, which is why (as I’ve said) I am opening this thread to everyone who may have knowledge of how to fix this. I am fallible, I am nowhere near perfect. I merely report a bug/exploit that effects my enjoyment on Roblox.
The situation is already pretty well-known. The ROBLOX staff disabled comments because of it (specifically because people were bot-posting scams). The reason it’s still going on after all this time is because there’s no easy solution.
Perhaps, there could be a way to prevent groups from being botted? Even manually approving join requests can prove to be a hassle. The only other option would be to turn on BC-only, but you’re missing out on a lot of opportunities for non-BC users.
Are you wondering about how they can be tackled now, or what features could be implemented to stop them? Your mention of existing features makes me think you meant the former, so I’ll answer that.
The best way to tackle the issue with the resources we have available right now is to use your own bot. Set up an unbottable in-game achievement (so not something like “walk 5 miles”) that takes a reasonable amount of time to complete. Once players complete that achievement, promote them, giving them access to the wall/etc. If you’re worried about member count bloat (which I’m not sure why that’s a problem since all it does is change a number), you can instead set up your bot to approve join requests. We have a tutorial here to help you get started.
There is no solution for this at the moment that the staff agrees with.
Botting is inevitable and can’t be stopped. There would always be a way to do it, so I feel like it’s something that they’ve come to terms with, and sort of look away from.
Coming from someone who’s made at least 20 bots to do random, fun, and hacky things on roblox, it’s very easy to create a bot if you are mediocre in programming.
Internally, all bots do is just browse the website as if they were a real person. They submit their account info and create an account as if you would on the actual homepage. They use the same uris that we use every day on the roblox website.
On their end, determining if somebody is a bot isn’t that easy of a task. There’s many ways to go about it but for a company like Roblox it has to pass a “check list”, they have standards that they try to meet for the website. Even with captchas, botting would still very much so exist. A captcha isn’t going to stop me from making bots.
In short, there is no simple solution to solve this issue. It isn’t worth their time because somehow, someway, people will figure out how to bypass their system.