As a Roblox developer, it is too hard to update my game’s description - one of the most basic necessities to fostering a good community. I don’t like to play a guessing game every time I update my game’s description as to what is the “inappropriate” text.
It also doesn’t help that the box to view your description is small and can’t be extended, like other text boxes around the website.
If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would improve my development experience because I wouldn’t waste time trying to guess the censorship filters of Roblox.
Yes, a preview box of what you’re typing versus what is shown would be nice to indicate what is censored or not. Just like the box to the right of the one I’m typing this text in now but showing the hashtags of censored words.
I’ve had to risk my account potentially getting moderated on several occasions just to test the filter because profile descriptions retain the old behaviour of accepting but tagging text submissions rather than rejecting the text submission like group and game edits.
It’s not helpful that I can’t pick out the problems to be corrected and the previous behaviour was equally unhelpful in accepting the text submission but replacing it with tags and destroying any formatting such as new lines. This issue has made me develop a habit of always doing Ctrl + A + Ctrl + C whenever I write any text or preserving it in a text file.
This issue heightened my frustration in a recent case where a single Unicode character caused an otherwise-filter-friendly submission (objectively speaking, this is not my opinion that it shouldn’t be filtered) to get entirely rejected. A test on my profile caused my entire description to get flagged.
Images from my filter report available below, before and after.
This is beyond infuriating that this isn’t solved yet.
How is this productive in any way?
This system says we can’t update our descriptions of our items, if I change one (in my estimation) innocent word, the entire description can’t be updated. With no hints.
I add a inconsequential word and now it’s not able to be updated, does that mean the old description became inappropriate? How is punishing the developer wanting to upkeep their descriptions of their items a solution to the problem of “inappropriate content” (of which I highly disagree anything I am trying to add or have typed is inappropriate) on older descriptions?
Not to mention, it strikes off a million things as “inappropriate” when they aren’t. I’d go as far as to suggest the ability to Pay R$ to ask for manual review of your text to allow you to use completely normal words in completely normal sentences.
No way should we ever have to pay Robux to have a manual review. It should automatically highlight the words in question for everyone. Most of the time, if I know the problematic words I can usually find synonyms. The entire problem is not knowing what is “wrong”.
I’ve found that if you make a change in the game settings in studio (for example, change the player count) it’ll update your description with #'s for the inappropriate words. Suppose another piece of the “every feature we put in studio, we likely won’t put on the website” vision.
However, if you’re trying to put a new description in, this is no use, as you cannot put a description on your game from studio.
This is absolutely infuriating that it still hasn’t been fixed. Though I am repeating myself from over a month ago.
My game’s description has become “inappropriate” since updating it 2 days ago
How am I supposed to tell my players in the game description the main update?
I understand why Roblox may not want us to know what’s being censored. It’d allow bad actors to bypass the filter in seconds. But you can already figure out in minutes what’s being censored with trial and error.
I’d love for this to be solved. Highlight, or give me a list of, offending words so I can easily roll out our next update. The description is a major pain point in moderation today.
This is still a problem that plagues developer’s post update cycle. We are often tired, hungry and easily irritable after spending hours completing an update. The last thing we want to face is Roblox itself not telling us what in our description is deemed inappropriate so that we can fix it, and then move on with our lives.
Roblox should definitely at least highlight or give a hint of what may be inappropriate.
Another related issue I have is that sometimes roblox may change their filter, and then when I go to update an older description and say for example change the little update log in the description, or even remove it, roblox will still detect something as “inappropriate”, and then I would have to either cancel, or change my original description all together until its allowed
Bumping, this STILL is an ongoing issue and a very annoying one. I’ve been emailing back and forth with Roblox support for over a month now about this very issue I’m facing and helping me figure out what is the exact word/words causing my game’s description to not save, and not even they know from the looks of it. Roblox needs to implement something where it specifies what exactly they mean by the game description/title can’t save. This is not something that can just be simply ignored, I NEED to change my description! Someone needs to look at this for real.
I absolutely up this, filter is desperately in need of some quality and functional improvements.
Having tools would be very useful for community managers.
In fact, if filtering is made to prevent things from being published such as names and descriptions of things, it can be used to protect creators in case they are unaware something might result in moderation if they go further publication.
Making simple descriptions for your place is very difficult to do, and the error message never provides a descriptive reason.
I’ve had to deal with this problem for around 6 years at this point, and I’m surprised it hasn’t even been considered that this should be a feature; just telling people what’s wrong with a description.
The filter system itself has plenty of flaws, and does not consider context at all, and I’ve had multiple players of my war games get kicked mid-session for “Spamming” after calling for “Medic!” multiple times.
It has however, come a long way since the beginning of Roblox. I just hope that Roblox does a better job at providing reasons for their actions regarding the filter system, and issue warnings without kicking players.
I do not think manual research is required for every bit of text, and in fact I heavily encourage use of robots; but they mustn’t be given too much power, or they’ll only cause more harm than good. By providing a simple reason for filtering on any piece of content, and not being harsh on game warnings, I feel that the community will become a lot more understanding to the filtering issue.
