Let me use the Share button even if the game is private

Feature Requests Studio Features
#1

As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to get a link to private games from inside Studio.

I need to configure some settings and test a place online, and I need it to stay private. I tried the share button, which usually gives me a link I can copy to my clipboard. Instead, I’m met with this:

image

It’s true that I can’t do much sharing of the game if it’s private, but that’s not what the share button means to users. It means “give me a link, and optionally send it to someone.” The hint and Game Settings button make sense, but I would appreciate if it would still give me a link to the game. It can do this in addition to letting me know that only members of our development team can access the game.

It’s worth noting that I can share this game with other members of our development team, but this behavior is preventing that!

48 Likes
Open place page in browser from Studio
#2

This feature still goes unused for me, but I would love to be able to quickly share games since I am always in studio & sometimes flip my page on the website to something different. This would also help out people who close their browser (like I used to) to be able to run studio at it’s best performant state. Simply allowing us to grab a link from there directly removes any other hassle, and since this feature exists we should be allowed to use it to it’s full potential and not just to active games.

6 Likes
#3

When I am developing games, I often need to play test them with friends and other developers. The share button helps a lot in this case, as being able to quickly get a link to the game and to send it around is a blessing - if the game is public. I usually leave my games on private so unauthorized users do not join the games while I also allow developers and testers to join, but this reasonably standard configuration effectively kills this feature for me, given that the modal does not show the link in this scenario.

In this situation, I really have only two alternatives:

  • Execute print(game.PlaceId) on the command bar, copy the result and then manually type the URL to the place: www.roblox.com/games/ID/game. This is not user-friendly, requires knowledge of Lua and takes a very long time, but not longer than:
  • Opening my browser, going to roblox.com/develop, waiting for the page to load (the develop page in special is not a very fast page to load), spending a few minutes finding the place on my groups or inventory, right clicking the link to the place and copying it.

Both of these degrade my workflow and force me to spend time I could have spent testing the game or developing it.

7 Likes
#4

It’s been over a year since I posted this, and I still run into this user experience issue at least once a week.

At Adopt Me, we’re now making use of game access controls to allow testers into our many work-in-progress feature places. This means the game is “private”, but testers are allowed to play. We always test before approving and releasing any feature.

Right now, this workflow looks like:

  1. Open our development place
  2. Publish to a new place
  3. Make relevant changes
  4. Set game access in Game Options
  5. Open up the Roblox website
  6. Open the Create page
  7. Switch to group creations
  8. Click on the place
  9. Copy the URL
  10. Share the URL in our QA Testing Slack channel

Steps 5 through 9 require a lot of waiting and additional clicks. These could be consolidated into one step by expanding upon an existing feature: the share button in Studio.

In order to resolve any confusion with private places, the share pop up could warn, “This place is private, but other developers and ranks you’ve allowed in Game Options can still play.” It can even include both the game URL and a “Game Settings” button.

11 Likes
#5

The only reason I have ever wanted to use the share button is to open up the place in my browser, but I can’t even do that since the development places I work in are private. All of the alternatives to the share button are either obscure or take a long time. I run into this issue at least once a week and it drives me nuts. It should be a simple fix, so please implement it!

5 Likes
#6

I run into this issue quite frequently as well. I wish that there was a way for me to share a unique url with the users that I want to test with and granular permissions that allow me to control. As a developer, like the stuff mentioned above, this really hits my workflow when it comes to testing. A developer invite link to edit or just view (read only) would be handy as well. Sometimes I have a friend look over my code to see if any improvements are made but, at the same time I don’t want an accidental edit. pls

1 Like
#7

This is still a much needed feature.

Today I had to upload to a group a couple of private places for a project and set them up, and I needed the place links so I could update certain website settings and share them with my partners.

However, since the places were private (because they’re development places which aren’t supposed to be played), I could not use the Share button as it requires the game to be public.

I instead had to go to the website and navigate through three pages, six clicks and a minute for something that could have been done way more quickly, had the Share button allowed it. My flow was:

  1. I opened my local place file I wanted to publish
  2. I published it to two different games on the same group
  3. I opened Roblox in my browser (after intuitively clicking the Share button and realizing that I could not use it)
  4. I clicked the Create tab (and waited for the page to load)
  5. I clicked Group Creations (and waited for the page to load again)
  6. I selected the group I uploaded my places to (and, once again, waited for the page to load)
  7. I right clicked the places and copied the links
  8. Finally, I sent them over to my partners.

If the Share button allowed links to private places to be shared:

  1. I would have opened my local place file
  2. I would have published it to two different games on the website
  3. I would have used the Share button to get a link to them
  4. I would then have sent the links to my partners.

Furthermore, the same problem happens whenever we have a place that we want to run a test session on.

We usually make the testing place private and configure the permissions through the game settings so users above a certain rank in our group are allowed to join.

The Share button, however, does not like us sharing links to private places, so we need to go through that lengthy process every time just to get a link to the place to send to our testers. And this happens multiple times a month.

If the intent was to improve UX so people did not accidentally share links to inaccessible games, a warning near the visible links could be kept, because the current behavior is a legitimate hindrance to our development flow: even newer users who might not know about the Create page and have always accessed their projects through Studio may also have a hard time finding the right path to the place through the website.

Please consider implementing this feature. The infrastructure is already there (fetching the place status/showing an UI element conditionally), and it would go miles towards making development on Studio more streamlined and pleasant to work with.

3 Likes
#8

I was about to make a feature request for this before finding this thread. I am blocked by the public gating on this feature multiple times a month and it’s very annoying :slightly_frowning_face:. I wish I could use this feature with private games!

2 Likes
#9

It has been 3 years since this feature request was created. As someone who spins up multiple new places a day to test various concepts and new features, this makes my workflow extremely tedious.

I know this a very small change and does not warrant as much attention as game-breaking updates do, but it’s the small features that make a usable platform. Take any modern text-editor for example, all the tiny features add up to make a great experience.

I don’t want to have to open roblox and wait for the develop page to load or type this awfullness into the command line:

=string.format("https://roblox.com/games/%i", game.PlaceId)

Small changes make a huge difference and are what makes a good app a great one.

Please consider this.

Poll to gauge interest:

Started 2022-07-21T23:52:00Z

  • I want to be able to share private games
  • I do not care about sharing private games

0 voters

#10

This is a very interesting point. I’ve always thought pretty much any develop page is way too slow. I’m not sure why roblox can’t cache things and make them easier, but pretty much going to ANY game page through the development pages is impractical.