Migrate to TextChatService: Removing Support for Legacy Chat and Custom Chat Systems

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.

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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.

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Real quick,

image

Fantastic, where?

I’m guessing it’s not out yet?

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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

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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

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The escape key is literally the furthest away from any of the 42 keys you normally press to compose a message though?

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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!

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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!

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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!

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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.

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They are only banning custom implementations that don’t go through TextChatService.

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It’s funny how much anger, very rightful anger, is above and below me because this was simple to minimise. All you had to do was communicate and listen better.


I understand the removal of legacy systems that’s past EOL, I support that even R6 when Roblox emulates it like it should be. But this like inbox is putting everything in the wrong order and some project manager out there is hoping with enough jamming, it’ll fit and work.

This thread and the inbox threads is how you pay for that, you pay with the anger of a community who otherwise have worked with you to let you fix this.

Yes, inbox was primarily used for spam and wasn’t used much, but there is some core and important uses that you just missed because you didn’t communicate, you have feedback programs dedicated to this. Use them. Now you have that entire full of people who your 0.1% of the graph ignored telling you that you’re wrong, you removed the inbox before communities even came out to replace, your platform with nearly 50% are under 13 and can no longer communicate any issues or any help. What do you want Jailbreak to do now?

And now you’re seeing it again here with the TextChatService, a service that any engineer who has bothered to look at the backlog should know a majority of what this thread should know about, and yet no one cared about or even ask the community. You’re paying the price again with anger

Is all this anger worth it? Is it worth the stress of just not communicating directly to the people who use and rely on your work? If you think it’s not worth it, make a change and start using more community feedback earlier in the process. You have an entire category (#roblox-surveys) and entire programs dedicated to getting info, make the most of it.


I’m sorry you’re the person who needs to confirm what should have been clear as day in the original post. What would had helped greatly is something stupidly simple

Hiding things

Because you know what people don’t do well at, reading massive blocks of text that don’t apply to them

And like that, I can hide a bit of stuff that doesn’t matter to me, and now I can skip to the things that matter, I can find the FAQ and understand that this feature you just mentioned a million times was there.


Do better - Communicate more

Maybe you’ll find that the community is much kinder when they feel like you care about them.

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I believe there’s too much going on for people to understand what you can and can’t do. After all, this is a major change.

I should probably start reading the announcement properly.

What are the policies around these scenarios:

  1. Players being able to communicate without text (e.g. emoji reactions that may appear above head/animation)
  2. Are “admin commands” allowed to display messages if they are hard-coded in the source code? We typically use a similar system to announce when we’re about to update our game with a timer until servers restart. (e.g. “/msg Update in 3 minutes” vs “/updmsg” which sends “Update in 3 minutes”)
1 Like