Edit: I was told from the Product Team that this is a bug and will be reverted. This however brings it back to a toolbox that is too small to be usable, and results in people having to go to the website for more plugins, which just moves the problem to the website. The point of this feature request is still relevant.
As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to discover new plugins without risking adding a backdoor into a game. Ever since the introduction of the plugin toolbox, the toolbox has been limited to those in the plugin marketplace program and made it difficult to find new plugins. As of the latest Studio release, this was changed to show all plugins, which includes the current botting on the plugins page. While this means all plugins can be installed from Studio now, it is really difficult to find non-malicious plugins from just opening the toolbox. Currently, this is what is shown to new users with the potentially malicious ones blurred out:
Having the toolbox be this wide in Studio is impractical, so users will most likely see the first 3 or so rows, which has more blurring than not. Having the ability to install any plugin from Studio is a good change; plugins like Rojo were much more difficult to install when the plugin toolbox went up. The consequence without improving the initial results is that up-and-coming games can potentially be taken down or broken by someone who created a back door without the developer even noticing. If Roblox wants to ensure the safety of the players by not having backdoors, as well as the sanity of the developers, this needs to be addressed.
Yeah this was a bad idea, I hope it was done by accident. (EDIT: It was.)
Plugins are not nearly sandboxed enough to be safe for general use.
This problem is rampant in pretty much every toolbox category right now when there’s no curation.
As someone who primarily develops plugins, I can only hope this gets reverted quickly. Many people already have concerns about plugin authenticity and security, and those people won’t be able to trust the Toolbox anymore. That’s going to negatively impact me and the people I work with.
However, I’d like to take the time to voice my support for greater plugin discoverability. While I prefer the toolbox being closed off right now, it’s only a short term solution. There’s still too many people being locked out who are completely innocent. I think it should be possible to find plugins via manual searching, for example. That being said, I do think that the homepage of the plugin marketplace (and perhaps all homepages) should remain tightly moderated and controlled for authenticity, with botted and malicious plugins removed as quickly as possible.
Being a hard-working developer myself and using plugins constantly for lighting or building purposes, I must say that this feature was a bad idea in the beginning and now in the present, viruses inside those plugins from somewhere and even plugins that were copied from the original source and creator, shameful today for developers.
In the end, I hope this can go away and be resolved so fake plugins or malicious ones can be removed and improve how we search up plugins in the future, but maybe models as well?
I 100% ran into this issues with this yesterday. Using toolbox to look for plugins was amazingly painful. Search results are terrible. There were loads of malicious plugins or re-uploads of the plugin I was looking for. Many of the plugins were unrelated to what I searched.
When I clicked on the creator of a plugin, I expected to see more details about the creator, like maybe their profile or group, instead, it applied a filter to only show the creator’s plugins. In one case, the creator’s name was something like “Official Roblox Plugins”. To see what that was about I finally figured out how to open the plugin in browser. I then clicked on the creator’s name again, and it brought me to a 404 page. My guess is that it’s a malicious plugin made by a group that got deleted?
Another problem I ran into was that when searching for a plugin that I had heard of or used before, tons and tons of search results came up with similar titles and exact copies of the icon. I am sure many of these plugins were copies of the one I was looking for, or malicious.
It turns out, the only plugin that costs Robux was the one that I was looking for.
