Today we are excited to announce two key improvements to badge privacy and management.
Improved Privacy for Disabled Badges
Starting today, the API endpoints used to fetch information about badges associated with a specific experience will no longer return information about disabled badges to consumers. Any users or tools that make use of these endpoints will no longer see any information about disabled badges for an experience unless they are authorized to manage that experience.
This change will help to prevent your disabled badges from being discovered or leaked. However, information for a disabled badge is still discoverable in several ways:
As long as the badge’s id is known, information about that individual badge can still be fetched, regardless of if that badge is disabled.
A disabled badge can still be viewed and accessed from the profile of a user who has earned it.
The thumbnail uploaded for a badge may still be discoverable. We recommend that creators exclude any sensitive information from the badge thumbnail or use a placeholder image until they are ready to make a badge public.
As of last year, badge ids are now larger and non-sequential, making them more difficult for scrapers to detect. However, these changes do not guarantee that a disabled badge will not be discovered.
Creating Disabled Badges
You can now create badges in the disabled state. This change ensures that your badges will no longer appear on the Experience Details Page before you are ready. You can now choose whether a badge will be enabled or disabled when it is created by using the Badge is Enabled toggle on the Create Badge form.
With these changes, we aim to give you better control over how and when your badges become visible to your users. We have also updated the Creator Documentation page for Badges to include this information.
Please let us know if you have any feedback or questions. Thank you, and happy building!
Is there any chance we could get something that lies in-between, like hidden badges? Badges that can be earned but have their image and description hidden from any user who doesn’t have it, kinda like Steam’s hidden achievements. It feels like it would be more fun than making an achievement called “secret achievement” that gives you no info about how you got it once you got it.
Will this change in the future? I would really appreciate if Roblox would not return any information even with the ID when the badge is not public, with exception being users that are authorized to manage the experience.
This is a decent update as it stops updates being leaked early, but one question.
If I disable a badge after its been enabled for a while, will it still remain under the game page, many games have event badges that have expired, see the several ??? badges from the RB Battles event.
Nice update. Will be useful when testing badges or just want to hide a badge for whatever reason. I personally will start using this for when badges are in development!
Privacy updates are cool and all but I hope badges can still be preserved for historical reasons.
I think it’s nice to be able to look at a badge from a dead / discontinued game for instance.
Or to see older badges like Alpha / Beta test badges from earlier phases of a game.
My team and I having been discussing ways to conceal certain aspects of the ARGs/puzzles that we create and it would be an amazing quality of life update if something like what @Disgustedorito has suggested was implemented.
oo maybe there could be a way of hiding badges from the badges area but till being able to give them? like those secret ones or something. Just a thought
Well, I was hoping this would be about badges in your inventory being private. People can still see new badges you get so they can follow you into games.
please don’t disable showing disabled badges
i like seeing all of the old discontinued badges
also this does not improve privacy at all
when does privacy mean “we wanna please the people who hate events being leaked”
this doesn’t improve my privacy whatsoever
