Key Takeaways
- Starting today, we are introducing significant updates to the built-in protections for our youngest users and easy-to-use tools to give parents and caregivers more control and clarity.
- As a reminder of our July announcement, we are also updating our content access policies for users under 13. Users under the age of 9 will only be able to access experiences with a content label of “Minimal” or “Mild” by default.
- We recently published updated policy guidance for our experience questionnaire to help keep our youngest users safe. Please remember to fill out the experience questionnaire for each of your experiences by December 3, 2024; otherwise, your experiences will not be accessible for users under 13. For more details, please refer to the “Next Steps” section.
- Users under the age of 13 will no longer be able to directly message others on Roblox outside of games or experiences (also known as platform chat), and will need parental consent for direct messaging within experiences.
Hi Creators,
Today, we are sharing the latest updates to our safety controls, including significant improvements to parental controls, how users under age 13 can communicate on Roblox, new content labels, and built-in protections for younger users. Before we dive in, here is a reminder of the latest updates to our content maturity policies:
Reminder of our Updated Content Maturity Policies
In July, we announced a change to our default content maturity settings for users under 9 years old. Starting today, users under the age of 9 will only be able to access experiences with a content label of “Minimal” or “Mild” by default. Parents can use parental controls to let their children access more mature content.
As a reminder, we’ve added the ability to see what percent of your audience is under 9 years old, to help you better understand the impact these changes will have on your experience(s). You can access this new functionality in Creator Hub under Analytics.
Additionally, to help provide parents and users more clarity into the types of content available on Roblox, we’ve begun labeling experiences based on the type of content users can expect in an experience, rather than by age. Experience Guidelines are now called Content Labels, which is reflected in the questionnaire you fill out for your experience. “Age Guidelines” is now called “Content Maturity”, and users will continue to be able to customize their access to experiences based on their Content Maturity setting under Parental Controls. The new content labels are now Minimal, Mild, Moderate, and Restricted.
You can find more information about these updates here.
Users under the age of 13 will not be able to join, search, and discover experiences without content maturity labels.
We recently published updated policy guidance for our experience questionnaire. If you have not already, please remember to fill out the updated experience questionnaire by December 3, 2024; otherwise,your experience will not be accessible for users under 13. All experiences without content maturity labels will be filtered out of search and any public or recommended sorts for users under 13. Go to Creator Hub > Creations then select an experience and go to Audience > Questionnaire to complete it.
Restricting social hangouts and free-form user creation to users 13+
Starting today, experiences with certain types of interactive features, specifically social hangouts and free-form 2D user creation, will only be accessible to users over the age of 13. Please review the previous DevForum announcement for more information.
New and Revised Parental Controls
We’re also announcing new and improved parental controls to provide more tools and visibility to parents over their child’s experience on Roblox.
Accounts with parent privileges
Today we’re launching remote management for parents, which allows parents and caregivers to adjust parental controls and review their child’s activity from their own accounts. Parents who want to be more involved in monitoring their child’s activities can link their Roblox account to their child’s account after verifying themselves using an ID or credit card. After linking accounts, parents can manage their child’s experience and access from Parental Controls.
Friends list and screen-time monitoring
In the Parental Controls dashboard, parents can now see their child’s screen time over the past week, as well as their child’s friends list. Parents can also set daily screen-time limits for their child.
Reminder about updates to the Roblox parent PIN
As previously announced over email, as of today, you are no longer able to set or use a parent PIN on your Roblox account. As always, if you are interested in an added layer of security on your account, you can set up 2-factor authentication.
Updates to our Communication Settings
Connecting with others is core to the Roblox experience, and we want to facilitate that with safety in mind. Over the next few months, we are adding new limitations and parental controls around how children under age 13 can communicate on the platform to add additional protections for our youngest users.
As we previously announced, we’ve removed the ability for users to message each other via the Roblox Inbox and are removing the legacy chat system by April 30. The primary reason for this change is to better ensure that all chat messages between users respect our privacy settings and parental controls. For more information about the legacy chat system change, you can read the prior DevForum announcement here.
In addition, users under the age of 13 will no longer able to directly message others on Roblox outside of games or experiences (also known as platform chat). When communicating in a game or experience, users under the age of 13 will be able to communicate using the broadcast public chat. To use direct messaging within experiences, users under 13 will need parental consent.
Next Steps
As a reminder, please do the following 2 things:
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Remember to fill out the experience questionnaire by December 3, 2024; otherwise, your experience will not be accessible to users under 13. If your experience contains any content that may be relevant to free-form user creation and social hangouts, you must re-take the questionnaire or your maturity label could be removed. However, if your experience is not impacted by the policy updates and does not contain content that relates to the descriptors, you do not need to update your answers and your maturity label will not be removed. We are looking into product updates to make it easier to answer just the new questions of the questionnaire.
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For those using forked legacy chat system or custom chat: Remember to integrate with CanUserDirectChatAsync API by January 30th, 2025. This API checks whether a user can receive or send direct chats. For experiences that do not implement this API by this deadline, we will attempt to automatically migrate experiences that do not comply. If that is unsuccessful, we’ll attempt to disable chat for those experiences until the experience is migrated to TextChatService. As a last resort, in the case of custom chat implementations that do not use either legacy chat system or TextChatService, we may need to restrict access to your experience to only you and notify you that you will need to manually remove your chat integration and integrate TextChatService to restore your experience.
For more details on these updates, please visit our newsroom and Help Center.
