You’re “not planning on it”. Why can’t you say with certainty that we will not be banned for legacy games we haven’t touched in years? Roblox has a history of flippantly changing their moderation policies on a whim and creating rules, then banning people for breaking them years before they were even rules. I’m simply not willing to trust that Roblox has my best interests in mind when it comes to this change.
7 Likes
Roblox making hilarious changes to its platform is inevitable. It’s pretty much impossible for people to persuade Roblox to undo changes.
If you wanna keep that thing on, I support you. But you know, it won’t be long.
This platform will eventually die out. And it’s just beginning.
If ROBLOX simply made TextChatService better than LegacyChatService, people would use it on their own without ROBLOX having to make threats of moderation to force us into using the inferior chat version.
But instead, LegacyChatService is the superior option from both the user and creator standpoint:
- With TextChatService, if you press esc, your old message will stick around like an unsightly stain in the input bar, and come back to haunt you like a vengeful wraith the next time you try to chat, still clogging up the input bar. LegacyChatService has improved QoL for users, as pressing Esc will clear this old message, but you can also just click off the chat if you want to leave your message unfinished to finish it later.
- TextChatService breaks all scripts that rely on ChatServiceRunner
- LegacyChatService has improved performance over TextChatService
- TextChatService UI Takes up more space to achieve the same functionality - an issue that seems to be pervasive with ROBLOX’s increasingly bloated UI
- LegacyChatService shows previous messages from before you joined the server, TextChatService does not, removing context from conversations and making servers feel dead and lifeless
I understand that ROBLOX wants to give parents more control for child ROBLOX users, but I don’t think government regulation is forcing a lack of basic QoL features like a slimmer UI and ability to clear your messages by hitting Esc.
ROBLOX already has built-in functionality to disable LegacyChat for guests and users who have chat turned off in parental controls, so why not just disable LegacyChat for underage users in games that have it?
Or ROBLOX could just listen to their users and just give developers the option to implement LegacyChatService’s superior functionality within TextChatService. But at this point, with ROBLOX outright removing basic features of the platform like messages, steamrolling everyone’s games with the top bar changes, and still trying to force things completely rejected by the userbase like the “metaverse”, “experiences” and rthro avatars, it doesn’t seem like user feedback is going to lead to any meaningful changes.
13 Likes
I still maintain hope that the community backlash will be strong enough that they’ll revert it or delay it indefinitely, but it seems rather unlikely
And it’s not like the new chat service is any better, I’ve seen people spewing racial slurs and very sexual content in it (and never in the old one)
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, and especially don’t make everyone use the version nobody wants to use.
3 Likes
We only did it with inboxes because Roblox gave two literal days notice.
This is different, and I believe they don’t care at this point so far.
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Overall, I agree that TextChatService certainly does need to be migrated to eventually for a variety of reasons, if minor safety is the biggest one in this case, I am all for that and agree 100%, however, I have a few words that Roblox really needs to hear…
If the food is undercooked, don’t feed it to us.
You don’t wanna give us salmonella, right? No. Spend more time improving TextChatService before doing this, TextChatService simply is not ready, and given the current pace of TextChatService’s development, it will not be ready in time for April.
There are bugs with it that have existed for more than a year, and worse, severe performance issues. These are just two examples but there are also tons of missing features that the legacy chat has which TextChatService simply doesn’t.
Roblox already has significant issues with providing acceptable performance with it’s corescripts, especially on CPU limited devices like consoles. Even though they can’t use chat, they also suffer from the same performance loss when using TextChatService.
Requiring the use of CanUserDirectChatAsync() should be more than enough to allow people to continue using legacy chat systems until these problems can actually be fixed, NOT “until April.” There is absolutely no elaboration on why we must move to TextChatService if the reason why we are being asked to move is something that we can do with something you just added.
13 Likes
Roblox’s MO for the last few years has been to remove core features, replacing them with inferior, less feature-rich systems with the promise that they will be better at some arbitrary point 2+ years into the future, accompanied by a crisp “Trust me”, and followed up with a failure to hit even the most basic of deadlines that they set for themselves.
For instance, public audios were removed, they promised a “better” system to share audios in the “near future”, and they then took nearly 3 years to add even the most basic public audio functionality. It simply isn’t good enough for them to continue to remove reliable, stable, quality systems in favor of some “fancier alternative” that they simply have not finished yet - or worse, haven’t even started working on yet.
There was a time where Roblox would announce they superseded a feature with nothing but genuine improvements over it’s predecessor, but now, it seems their focus has shifted to making systems that are over complicated, under featured, poorly documented, and / or simply don’t work. Oh, and if you don’t use them, your account is at risk.
12 Likes
Real quick,
Fantastic, where?
I’m guessing it’s not out yet?
1 Like
I agree with all your points here except for the first one. Why would you want your message to be erased when you press escape?
Normally I would do shameless self promo for this
but theres a solid 50/50 that this change breaks it too.
Anyway that out of this side, WHY???
TextChatService has become bloated (even when its technically hidden!) which causes many issues on low end devices. Another issue is that TextChatService doesn’t have most of the features of legacy chat.
LegacyChat’s APIs were the ONLY way to hook into the chat button and redirect it to our chat interfaces.
I, someone who made a frontend for the new API, have been relying on that API since there is no way to do that with the new APIs and an always onscreen chat isnt a great idea with the last few topbars. Please make an actually decent alternative, don’t moderate people who use the old chat system, or just make it a “deprecation” like what you did to Hints and Messages where they all still work but “you shouldn’t use them because they make me feel bad”
Requiring TextChatSystem in your community guidelines just bans custom chats and forces us into YOUR system we don’t like. Expect every major game to not follow them, most big games i’ve seen still use legacy chat
8 Likes
Escape is faster than doing ctrl + a + backspace.
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I mean… maybe. But I don’t see how this is a serious problem for anyone. If anything, I’d be worried that I would accidentally press escape and the message would unintentionally vanish.
Thanks for clarifying that.
When it was said that they were “exploring ways to auto-migrate old inactive experiences but may not be able to do this for all experiences.”, I imagined that “all experiences” would include starter places, not just games that use a modified version of legacy chat.
It was a clear misinterpretation on my part
2 Likes
The escape key is literally the furthest away from any of the 42 keys you normally press to compose a message though?
5 Likes
I suppose that’s true for people playing on the desktop client. I guess that would more so be an issue for users on mobile devices who accidentally opened the menu or something. I understand now why people prefer escape erasing your message. Thank you!
1 Like
Wait I just realised. Are they legitimately trying to ban custom chat implementations?
Roblox wake the hell up out of your delusions of grandure what in the actual
This is hilarious, in fact, I dont know if to laugh or be angry, its such an overcorrection with the venere of “safety” they forgot what their platform stood for originaly, creativity.
Powering Imagination
Unless you want
- Public Sounds
- Your own topbar UI
- And now, your own chat!
Great going guys, what you going to do next, remove R6? Come on. I know you want to!
14 Likes
R6 powers too many games and it’s impossible for Roblox to even start considering its complete removal. But then again, this is Roblox. Removing R6 is definitely in their “to-do” list.
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after this, i honestly wouldn’t put it past them.
R15 obbies are great and 100% reliable, trust me bro!
1 Like
Too many games rely on Legacy chat for them to try and remove it so idk
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One major difference between R6 and Legacy is that - unless you fully depend on using Legacy’s features, there should be no major difference. Other than performance, that is.
R6 has a different behavior when it comes to gameplay, so that’s the breaking point for Roblox - for now.
1 Like