Identify Staff/Admins on their Roblox profiles

As a Roblox user, it is currently too hard to …
Easily identify Roblox administrators and staff members on their user profiles.

Lets take a glance at the profiles of some administrators. Please note that I’m not calling them out, but using them as an example of how it’s hard to distinguish them from regular users

jjwu_play

jjwu_play - Roblox

darkmodeonn

darkmodeonn - Roblox

ilovemambo234

ilovemambo234 - Roblox

KiwiKoi555

KiwiKoi555 - Roblox

The provided screenshots are the first thing you see when visiting each accounts’ profile. In order to check if they’re actually an administrator or not, you have to scroll down and sift through their groups to see if they actually belong to the official admin group or not. If you don’t want to do this then there’s nothing signifying that they’re not just a regular user edit: other than the ‘Administrator’ badge which is currently hidden as of April 16th along with all other profile badges - and you still have to scroll down to the bottom of the page to see this.

Not only is this inconvenient but it’s bad UX. Roblox should be displaying their employee status as one of the first things you see when visiting those account profiles, to ensure users right away that they’re looking at the profile of an official Roblox admin/staff member.

Here’s a mockup of what I personally would like to see on an admin’s profile.


(note: I’m unsure of what this individual’s real job title is, “Engineer” is a placeholder)

We see their username, their job title and/or department, and then a special icon for them that lets the viewer know that, at the very least, this isn’t just a regular user.

If this issue is addressed, it would improve user experience because …
It will be easier for users to identify who’s an official Roblox admin/staff member, which provides several benefits in terms of preventing admin impersonation & associated scamming techniques, along with possibly getting to know a little more about the employee in terms of what they do for the company.

91 Likes

I think it’s pretty easy to distinguish a staff member from a normal user on their Roblox profiles. It only takes a few clicks and can be found under “Badges”.

Most of the time, if you’re in-game or something, you can check via the leaderboard and they’ll have a Roblox icon by their username and when they chat, it shows up as yellow. A lot of the top games, if this is overridden, show a distinction between a Roblox admin and a regular player.

I personally do not think that the mockup provided by you fits the actual theme of the site nor looks professional by any means even if it is a mock. Adding job titles and/or departments just seems weird. I think if I worked for Roblox or rather if my job did that to me, it would feel pretty unorthodox for people to know my job title given that the relevance doesn’t actually matter in the eyes of a player.

Unless the person has a badge under their name & you can verify that the account actually belongs to the person who’s claiming to be an admin, imo it’s pretty clear who isn’t and who is.

6 Likes

I argue it may be better not to have any highlight at all? That way they can just tell kids: do not trust anyone who asks you for your password / asks you to run a script/program / other details, etc. I doubt these staff badges actually significantly reduce scams/phishing.

There’s no point having the distinction for the purpose of security because it would imply there are things you should tell people with a staff badge vs. people without, which isn’t right unless it is in specific contexts (like devforum bug reports might have private files, so a staff marker here makes sense).

Kids should be taught they don’t give sensitive details to anyone regardless of whether a person is staff. (staff will never ask sensitive details anyway)

9 Likes

It’s convenient that users are replying now that badges appear on user profiles again. For context, this feature request was created during the week+ long period where roblox & user badges were hidden from user profiles.

You’re missing the point of the post. This is for identifying Roblox employees on the website. It’s bad UX if you’re unable to identify a website’s employee upon first glance of their profile and offers an indirect path for security issues such as admin impersonation. Lets look at some profiles from popular social media moguls

zuck

jack

spez

image

You’re able to clearly identify that these users hold weight in their communities, if not explicitly stating they’re an administrator. What makes this good UX is that it’s one of the first things you see on the profile, and you don’t have to scroll down and/or expand any lists to view it.

While I do appreciate you trying to argue the semantics of what a mock is, it detracts from what the overall point is of this feature request. I think @buildthomas has a better argument for why this shouldn’t be a thing

One of the overarching issues at hand is that Roblox does not do a lot to prevent this. Yes, Roblox can put these warnings in niche places such as the API docs, the browsers F12/dev console, various help/support links, but it’s not like these warnings are forefront anywhere that these scams are happening. In fact many of these scams are constantly evolving to avoid users seeing these types warnings - this is why there’s been an influx of scams involving Roblox’s robots.txt page.

I’d argue that it doesn’t imply anything beyond denoting whether a user profile belongs to a Roblox employee or not. If kids are being taught not to share their information with anyone, it shouldn’t imply what you’re suggesting it does. Which leads into my next point;

This is the ideal, utopian perspective and I personally 100% agree with this. Like I said though, just because they should be getting taught this stuff, it doesn’t mean they are getting taught this stuff. Until Roblox makes some real effort to teach the kids on the platform about this stuff, we’ll likely see more feature requests similar to mine here. If Roblox does eventually make some substantial push for informing users about these topics, then you’re right in saying it would make my feature request here obsolete.

7 Likes

In your PMs on Roblox.com there is a note telling you not to give your password to anyone when you write a message. They’re not doing nothing, albeit arguably this should be put on the reading view of messages as well. How else do you want them to educate users not to give sensitive information to random people?

Setting the standard that some users are visibly admins is more dangerous than not setting it because it then opens the door to fake badges and groups as being plausible to users who don’t know better. They should just be taught never to trust anyone.

4 Likes

You can still use a user’s membership in the “Official Group of Roblox” group to determine if they’re an Administrator.

However, it needs to be better outlined if a user is an admin without having to click through to their profile and scroll down to their groups to verify membership into one very specific group.

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Ah, I see. I still think that trusting anyone regardless of an admin or not is bad practice.

Regardless, I was bored today so, I made something simple that might be of use:


This image shows the Premium & Roblox icons being at the end of the username header than at the front. I’ve always found that icons should follow the username header instead of where it is now. This is probably because, like the examples you posted, most platforms have normalized it to the point where trailing makes the most sense.


This is pretty much what the Roblox icon does. When you hover over it, it has a basic tooltip that displays “Roblox Administrator”. When you click the icon, it sends you to over to the administrator badge link. i.e Badges - Roblox

Lets say that Roblox really likes the premium icon where it is now, something like this with the same functionality described above could work:

Lets say that the user is a staff member / administrator but, doesn’t have premium for whatever reason, it would look something like this:

If they wanted to match how it’s shown in-game, something like this could work:

If the user had premium and was an administrator, something like this could work:

The best looking and by far the most practical would be this:

For staff, something like this could easily work:

Again, I don’t really think this is needed but, the examples provided match in-game leaderboards and consistency throughout the platform much more than having the actual badge icon & the employee title
shown which imo is a bit too much. All of this took me literally a minute to play around with so, I can’t imagine it being that much work or a priority tbh. Cool for a stylistic thing ig.

11 Likes