As a Roblox developer, it is currently impossible to keep people from stealing and copying clothing on the catalog.
CLEAN UP THE CATALOG:
ROBLOX’s Image Uploading system automatically accepts pre-uploaded images, which means it has the shirt templates and stuff saved on its database.
With a simple database search it should be able to grab every single shirt with the same template ‘image’.
It can identify the original asset by it’s ID.
It should delete every single shirt / pants template that has been copied except the originals and by the original creator.
(It would identify the originals by the older asset ID) (Smallest Asset ID with the same template)
PREVENT SHIRT COPYING BOTS:
The same way assets get denied if you re-upload an asset, it will get denied if you re-upload it and you aren’t the original creator of the ORIGINAL asset.
This has been brought up many times before. Anyone looking to discuss the topic should review these threads before doing so. As @AbstractAlex mentioned, it’s not an easy fix – if it were, we would have address it by now. It’s as, if not more so, difficult as the botting issue. Any “aha!” solutions aren’t going to solve the problem.
A quick rundown of issues I’ve pulled from existing posts:
Someone can easily bypass by changing a single pixel
Clothing makers will sometimes publish contract work to their profile so it can be reviewed, and then allow the contractor to re-upload to their group/profile to sell it. This would delete all of those pieces of clothing and prevent them in the future
Auto-deleting all existing copies would not work, as sometimes they’re not perfectly stolen and are deformed before uploading making them an imperfect match
It is only possible to check exact similarity – not by a percentage, as it would have to iterate over every existing clothing item which is infeasible
No matter how much support this receives, an impossible problem still has no solution, and if we’re looking for solutions we’re not going to find any through forum discussion. If clothing theft bothers you so much that you want a solution ASAP, review the existing threads that have been posted and brainstorm solutions with that knowledge in hand. You will be spending days/weeks/months – this is not something that can be solved with cheap tricks.
Changing the ID worked in the past, but it’s not how clothing is stolen anymore. These asset pages had the full-res version of the clothing removed years back, so if someone tried to copy the image there the uploaded copy would be blurry. I agree that this page shouldn’t be visible as part of a larger change, as it’s just weird in general to expose internal stuff like that, but it wouldn’t stop asset copying.
That’s no good either. They’re using the full-res asset that’s applied to characters. If we apply a watermark to it, we get a watermark on our characters.
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?
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.
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.