As we see more and more users join the forum, it is becoming increasingly hard to moderate the posts created by new users. There is one active user in particular who is abusing the system.
With the forum allowing these users to upload images, they are given full control over what content the viewers see without, shall I say, mercy. This allows for troll posters to upload content that other users may find offensive. Keep in mind that this could be happening at any given moment at any time. As the troll users are eventually moderated, by that time they would have gotten several alternative accounts already on the forum, ready to do abusing of the forum’s controls.
Remember how I said to keep in mind that it could happen at any moment? That moment could be while the moderators are offline. Meaning that all the troll posts accumulate over the hours and then pile up to a point where their content is littered everywhere, making it harder to moderate. This makes the moderators’ job more difficult than it needs to be and does not solve the problem very well.
I don’t know how the Roblox forum teams can accomplish making the forum harder to join but I feel like that would solve the root cause of the issue, or at least mitigate it. I’m sure there are other ways to reduce the problem’s size, but this seems like the best option for now (that I can think of). Another idea is to have some sort of automatic moderation, but I think we all feel the same way about that (ahem… getting banned for saying the word “roblox”).
The current issue I am referring to is a topic called Roblox help FORUM located in #help-and-feedback:platform-usage-support, where the user who has created the topic has also been one of those troll posters. I’d politely advise against quoting the topic so no images are brought here.
If not making it harder to join, at least have an international moderator who can cover the times when the American moderators are unavailable to moderate the devforum
This sadly will not really fix the problem.
Many kids can use their parent’s ID cards and forcing ID checks is kind of a privacy violation since it contains personal info.
(Edit: Made an oopsie, I forgot that ID checks on Roblox require a picture of your face as well.
It wouldn’t really be possible for kids to use their parent’s IDs.)
There are reasons not everyone wants to give their ID.
I did it so I wouldn’t get blocked from certain platform features but despite giving consent to have my ID verified, it still felt a bit invasive on my privacy.
I’d argue that it is not getting very hard to moderate to forum but rather no action is taken against offending users, obvious troll posts nearly never result in a suspension and even if they do, the offending user is usually back in a few days to do the exact same thing again.
Coverage time for moderation has somewhat gotten better as of recently, it’s still not perfect yet I have personally found that there is now at least a moderator online at most times.
It’s worth noting that we should focus on the wider problem (troll posts on the forum) rather than a specific possible solution that appears to fix the issue (make the forum harder to join). While the former is certainly an issue that needs to be addressed, the latter may not be the best solution for the problem in each persons’ view. For example, I too believe that troll posts are an issue yet I cannot support this topic since I believe the better solution is to enforce more harsh moderation.
These points are valid; however, I’ve seen what has happened recently and it appears that your second point is false:
Someone recently was automatically moderated and got a suspension time of about 75 years. The user was suspended, but the posts that were inappropriate were still up (hidden at most). That is, if they do not have alts.
This is good to hear. Coverage time is very important to moderation.
I suggested something similar in my topic:
Unless more moderators are available on the forum, there isn’t another fix besides automatic moderation (which needs improvement).
Plus, considering all the reports of incorrect categories made, there is no priority between off-topic posts (not very important) and NSFW posts (very important). Unless some sort of moderator UX was redesigned to make moderation easier, or if there were literally more moderators, the problem cannot be mitigated this way.
But these are just my thoughts. How could moderation be harsher?
Keep in mind that many people who troll are accounts that are at least a year old. People who join the forum just randomly start trolling after years of inactivity. That is why I’m realizing that maybe making it harder to join the forum might not work as a solution to this specific problem, but it might mitigate it in the future.
I made a similar post about this some time ago. I agree that they should add more requirements. Or revert back to when it was private even though it’s controversial. Many people extremely hated the idea that Devforum would become public. As of what I remember there were a lot of post that weren’t in the right category’s or post that were to simple to be on the Forum .
There aren’t any reputable sources for “kids using parents’ cards” to bypass the Veriff verification progress. Veriff is the third-party platform Roblox contracted to verify users’ age. The argument is a load of baloney.
This forum would most definitely be enhanced if there was a verification wall before you are ranked to member. There are way too many children shitposting en masse because they just don’t know any better.
It’s genuinely saddening that the idea of a moderation team enforcing the rules on their own accord as opposed to waiting for someone to spell it out to them in a something else report is considered harsh, let alone harsher than whatever we have currently.
“Harsh” might be the wrong word in my reply. To be more politically correct, I should have said:
Roblox should acquire their Moderation Team of Authorized Personel adequate skill to perform the duty of rule and guideline enforcement to ensure a high-quality user experience to all users, past, present, and future, instead of leaving it as a user-initated section of compliance issue reports, whether or not it be correct or in a timely fashion, in addition to the Personel’s current status not being ideal for the situation involved, which may or may not cause yielding to the current issue, delaying the action by lengthy periods of time which causes inefficiency to the process in which the user deemed important.
Summary
Roblox’s moderation should do things on their own instead of only allowing user reports on posts at times when the mods are sleeping.
Its easy for you to say that when you are in the program, but it’s not fair for the people that would contribute a lot to the forums and aren’t able to get in, same thing with UGC happens right now, where many amazing creators like me are trying to get UGC access but we haven’t got in while UGC creators who did get in are protesting to not let more people in.
Before the DevForum required read time, it used a quiz for acceptance. People who were actually contributive passed, and those who could not pass would look it up on YouTube, unfortunately.
If you could suggest another possible solution to this issue, it would be great discussing about it.
While I do agree with you, keep in mind I am an actual developer (albeit a bad one at that) and it took almost a year from me joining the forum to be able to post.
