"Inappropriate place name or description" is extremely vague and unhelpful

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.
image

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.

174 Likes

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.

32 Likes

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.

Without Unicode character:

With Unicode character:

We need previews. Not want. Please respect developers.

52 Likes

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?

28 Likes

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.

9 Likes

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”.

Otherwise for having chat filter reviewed, then people can use this
https://devforum.roblox.com/t/chattext-filter-review-requests/25717

16 Likes

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.

5 Likes

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?

4 Likes

Bump, still not resolved.

Trying to add simple updates to the description and getting this error is not helping with keeping on a timely development/update schedule

5 Likes

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.

29 Likes

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.

8 Likes

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

8 Likes

Bumping this post since it was, it is and will continue to be annoying if Roblox keeps doing nothing about it.

5 Likes

still bumping this topic until roblox do a thing, i couldnt even change my description AT ALL

3 Likes

Please fix this! It is really annoying not being able to see what is wrong with the description.

3 Likes