Issue with in-game bots

[SurpriseInventor]

• Hi, there is a known issue on Roblox with bots that offer players in-game to go outside of Roblox website to the scam websites.

• I wanted to know, how you fight against those bots and prevent players from getting poor gaming experience. What minimum age (days) do you use to prevent from joining your game?

• Maybe there is some sort of plugin which let’s you prevent from chatting the link to the scam websites, or phrases like “Today I got a ton of robux, if you want go to (…)” or “visit (…) to get free robux”

• It would be very helpful to me and others, who want to give the best gaming experience to other players, if you will share your experience below with that currently on-going issue.

[BlueJayManiac]

Here’s a good thread that discusses minimum age implementations:

Account Age Minimum Limits (for games)

I’ve seen the topic of account age limits over the years countless times. Some devs say it’s allowed, and some say it’s a bannable offense. Others say it’s an unspoken rule. Devs have done 2-day limits, while others have done up to a 30-day account age limits. I know account age limits aren’t a perfect solution to the exploiter problem, but they do help. But I haven’t seen a definitive answer to if this is allowed or not. I and others want to know what’s Roblox’s deal (if any) with account age …

I’ve honestly never seen these kinds of scams inside ROBLOX games, though. The chat filter is quite strict. I’ve only seen the scams on the actual website.

[Steven_Rafft (Ruben)]

@callmehbob made a script/model to disable these kind of scams && stuff

[BullfrogBait]

Bots usually stick to one type of “message” and they just join, paste, and leave and continue on. Figuring out what one bot says and filtering it/banning them will save your game.

[SurpriseInventor]

Thanks, it is a helpful thread for me. In my opinion, setting age limits to prevent exploiters is pointless?, that would be useful for bots, that are not controlled by people. Exploiters are humans. They may have various accounts with 2+ age limit. Not definetely setting the 30 days+ as that is very high limit for audience.

[SurpriseInventor]

Thank you, I will defenitely use it for my future projects!

[SurpriseInventor]

Yeah, thanks for suggestion. I’m just thinking about the ban of a player in-game, who says obvious scam bots phrases. Maybe temp ban… like 1-2 minutes, so if player accidentally said that, he can return to the game and scam bot will go to the next game automatically.

[Steven_Rafft (Ruben)]

It’s a good idea but people sometimes will not rejoin so i’d recommend just telporting them back to the game again maybe?

[GloriedRage (Atreides)]

Here is a useful thread regarding this:

Place botting explanation & ways to combat it

EDIT: as of 7/7/2020 the information below is mostly out-of-date, bots are capable of much greater things and can circumvent the protection I came up with below. Recently, player bots have begin to surface. These bots are often used by exploiters to bot their own games to the front page, but I’ve seen these targeted against developers to get their games under review, or even their accounts falsely banned. Here’s an excerpt from the most popular botting service being sold: Robot does not wrap…

Keep in mind bots usually do not load characters or the data model.

[SurpriseInventor]

Indeed, sanity checks are the main part of providing the best player gaming experience. I usually use the report feature to report any scam bots. However, when I check when they joined the website, I see a very recent join date. So I can’t understand what you mean by the already existing accounts.

[Meta_data (Meta)]

This thread is more for a different type of bot. I believe (though I’m not entirely sure) that the bots OP mentioned use a macro, or possibly a script executor to fire a chat remote, and then leave.

This seems like it could be countered by simply making the player type something before they are allowed to chat.

[GloriedRage (Atreides)]

Most bot accounts that I have seen are reused accounts dating all the way back to 2018. Account age is not a 100% method to preventing this, rather, you should filter chat messages and do the checks described in the thread I linked.

[GloriedRage (Atreides)]

I think the chat bots do not load characters either, unless something has changed as of recently

[Meta_data (Meta)]

Are you sure about this? These chat bots are extremely old, and date back to before client emulators were even feasible.

[GloriedRage (Atreides)]

I’m not entirely sure, but I would suspect that the perpetuator of these bots would so in the most computationally efficient way possible. I looked around on youtube and couldn’t find any evidence that the bots loaded their characters but also couldn’t find evidence to the contrary, so the only account I have is one from my friend who went into a server full of spam bots yet did not see any characters.