Users are not stealing clothing with inspect element. They aren’t even stealing assets from the website anymore, because the “-1” asset’s page no longer contains the full-res image. They’re fetching assets the same way the website (for 3D preview / thumbnails) and game servers do.
I mean, the way I go to retrieve my own templates in full quality is to just keep subtracting from the id until I reach the template (you can find it more effectively, but most of the time I just don’t need to bother), convert what’s in the address bar in to an asset link and then enter it to download the file.
After that, it’s simply a case of adding “.png” to the end of the filename so that you’ve got the correct file extension and bam there’s my template back.
Also, in response to EchoReaper, I might be mistaken but I don’t remember that the full res image was ever displayed on the asset page? that has always been a 420x420 display to my memory. I think a lot of the confusion about that being “fixed” comes from the people who were previously relying on extensions and such to do the method I detailed earlier. Since that time many of those extensions were broken because the format of the catalog addresses was changed. But the old “-1 id” method of copying was always associated with the poor quality 420x420 being stretched.
Anyway, if I agree with anything it’s that there’s not much you can do to fix it. Sure, you can make it ‘slightly’ more difficult but it only takes one person to create a bot that just does all the work and makes it easy for everyone again, so even accessibility isn’t a factor in most of these cases.
If there were an issue I think ROBLOX genuinely should consider it’s the algorithm used to determine what’s “Most relevant” for clothing, as currently, it relies solely on revenue generated rather than factoring in any sort of quantity. The result of this is that people are deleting their own clothes from their inventory and then buying them off themselves for large quantities of robux (and still making 70% back as it’s their own creation, 30% lost from tax). It’s basically an unethical method of sponsoring, especially where copied clothing is concerned anyway.
Still, like I’ve made a point of saying in the past, I’m not optimistic roblox will pay much attention to an area that clearly they don’t see much incentive in “fixing”. Even under great hypotheticals that clothing got attention and could have many of its issues fixed, a lot of the damage that has already been done is simply irreparable.
Right, sorry for not specifying. It wasn’t directly on the page, but it was in the page source. You’d search for “rbxcdn” or whatever their image hosting url is and look through them until you got the full-res asset. The full-res asset isn’t in the page source any longer, and tools that download the assets seem to be popular now instead. Since the user only needs to use the tool, the implementation doesn’t have to be user-friendly and can take advantage of some more advanced approaches that weren’t previously used very often.
However we face the problem of some people who willingly share their uniforms to others. Roblox uses a third party moderation program for content I believe with image moderation abilities. Can you imagine sorting legitimate from stolen outfits even with minor tweak? What about customs? Its simply just sound you can’t crowd control without harming the community at the same time.
This just struck my mind, what if during the moderation process, it shows, to the moderator, 3 more most similar assets which are not owned by the uploader.
Also if you compare auto leveled histograms of two images, changing one or two pixels is not enough to change the whole histogram and if you do change the histogram enough, that means you’ve created a new shirt.
You can also lower the samples of a histogram and still have high enough fidelity to compare properly through the database. Lowering the samples would mean faster comparisons through the database. If data space is a problem, you can look into many histogram compression methods.
You could compare specific 100 samples per image, if those samples exceed 80% similarity, compare 1000 more samples of the same histogram and if that exceeds 95% similarity, check all the samples and if the similarity still exceeds 95%, add it to the memory and pass onto the next image. If it doesn’t exceed the similarities in previous checks, still skip to the next image.
This is one way to do it. I’m sure there are better ways to do this. Many sites are capable of doing this kind of search over larger libraries why shouldn’t Roblox be able to?
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Or, like deviantart, you can apply a watermark when uploading the image, and it’ll do it for you
Unless you want a watermark to appear on your clothing while you’re wearing it, no you can’t.
The watermark appears on the catalog but not in-game
That’s not how clothing stealing works. You can apply anything to the catalog preview and it won’t show up on the copy because they’re not stealing the catalog preview.
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Im trying to say, that there could be a redesigned uploading page for shirts and pants and t shirts, where you can apply a watermark with a faint roblox logo, and your username, like what deviantart does. On the website, inventory, catalog, etc. it displays this watermark, even when attempting to view the asset page, but in game, the watermark is removed. The watermark is applied but isn’t actually on the clothes, it just looks like it is. Only another part of the site that staff can view has the original asset, or something like that.
Again, the asset you’re applying the watermark to is not getting stolen. They’re stealing the asset used in-game.
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I think a lot of people aren’t getting this because theres a notion that asset stealing goes on only via the web page rather than in-game. Many need to realize that times have changed and the people who make a living off of this are only getting smarter at how they do it.
In-game??!! Wow, all this time I believed it was onsite.
That’s not the exact phrasing I used. The assets are being retrieved in the same way the game retrieves them – not by the users joining a game and stealing them that way (though they could if they wanted to through Fiddler/memory dumps).
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Um the thing is that everyday i am discovering more and more big groups wich one copy clothing and making a lot of robux from it… i think roblox need to pick like ‘designers of the month’ and feature their clothing on front page, twitter page. fb page and insta page…
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To be honest, I think to counter clothing theft, creating clothes would have to become an OBC only thing. Like devex, people would have to apply for a clothing designer role. If said person has become an official clothing designer, the person would have to follow specific clothing designing rules. If person does not follow these rules, clothing designer rank shall be revoked, person shall stay with obc but won’t be able to make clothing anymore or for a few months. I think this might be a better alternative as to almost giving anyone the ability to make clothing, which makes it easier to steal.
Person would have to be at least x days on roblox, have obc and have a clean moderation history. This group would be watched by moderators thoroughly.
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That’s a step backwards in UGC and would result in far fewer clothing items existing.
Clothing stealing is an issue, but it isn’t worth shutting down the entire market for.
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Out of curiosity, did you read any of the posts on this thread?
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Don’t reply to a thread you aren’t going to bother to read.
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I’m sorry for bumping an old post but I think this is relevant
Doing -1 on the ID still works (even today) for downloading the asset directly.
To give a better idea of what’s going on (that I think, anyway): If you put the word “asset” between the / and ? of the URL, it downloads the asset the same way that the Roblox Player does. I am assuming that the roblox game downloads the file to the client by extracting the data from the website; what I think the main problem is, is that a client like google chrome also has permission to extract the data from the website as well. Thus allowing me to download a full resolution image of the article of clothing.
While mentioned before (that Shedletsky touched on as well) that you can download full assets alternatively by just going through the memory and using the pieces you find, I believe the majority of people using the above mentioned method are basically just tricking the Roblox website into thinking that chrome is no different from the Roblox player.
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