Problem:
As a Roblox developer, there is no official way to interact with any web API in an automated fashion. To create bots, Developers would create new Roblox accounts and use them as their bots. Recently, Roblox added a new captcha system which essentially broke bots. This makes it very challenging to create a bot. This captcha system was needed to ease down the huge wave of malicious bots that was basically taking over Roblox.
Suggested solution:
I propose to add official mechanisms for automated access to (at least a part of) the available Roblox API endpoints.
Example of an implementation of the solution: (Bot accounts)
To create a bot, a user would go to the Develop page and click a button that would lead to the bot creation process. Here, the bot creator would give the bot a name and a profile picture if they wish for the bot to have one, otherwise, there would be a default profile picture. After the bot has been created, a bot token would be created. This bot token can be used as an authentication key that allows the developers to perform actions through the bot.
To prevent any abuse of this bot, there would be restrictions to this bot. Bot accounts will not be like regular player accounts. They can’t have friends, followers, or follow any users. They also can’t like or dislike games or private message users. They would be allowed to post on the group wall but the rate at which they can post messages would be limited. The user would also have the ability to generate a new bot token in case their bot token is compromised.
When a bot is added to a group, the user could assign a role to the bot or there can be like a system where the bot is granted certain permissions. Only the bot creator would be able to invite their bots groups. To add a bot to a group, the bot creator would have to have developer access in the group and if the bot creator is not the group owner, then the group owner would have to accept the request and grant the bot the permissions it needs.
Conclusion:
I know that my request requires a lot of work in order to make it a reality, however, it would help a lot of developers. For example, if this was implemented, it would make it possible for me to create an automated process for ranking people up in a group from outside of Roblox games. Moreover, this would allow better integration with popular community tools outside of Roblox which are necessary to drive engagement and community value for our games.
There are many other uses for bots that I know that a lot of developers would find very useful, please comment below if you have any additional use cases yourself. Thank you for reading, and let me know what you think about this idea.