Personally for the games I work on I don’t mind this since we had to migrate over to TextChatService to better accommodate our international audience anyway, as previously the roleplays were always kept in English, and adopting this system has since opened up possibilities for some of our non native English speaking players to interact with other players in our games (though not all, we’re still eagerly awaiting more languages to be supported).
I will say that we were massive fans of the level of customization Legacy Chat had to offer, so much so that when I was looking into whether or not to migrate over to TextChatService, I definitely would have elected to avoid doing so had chat translations been implemented into the Legacy Chat system. Since we decided to migrate, the migration of older systems over to TextChatService wasn’t as easy as we’d hoped. Its customization options didn’t/still don’t rival the Legacy Chat, it’s still quite buggy (though I cannot comment on performance, I haven’t looked into that), and at the time we moved over there was very little good documentation from Roblox to the point we were endlessly hunting around for clues as to how to customize the new system in a way that felt right for our games.
I think as long as long as Roblox have taken the above points into careful consideration and (or have already) take action upon each of them before this deadline then the forced migration should go a lot smoother for other developers than it went for us.
I will admit I was quite angry when first reading this — but I now believe this is just a case of the team at Roblox having very poor communication skills.
In practice, what they actually meant to say, and please correct me if I’m wrong here @Photoguy82, is that “all chat must be delivered through the TextChatService API by April 30th”, such as TextChannels.
Most experiences today on Roblox that want to migrate to TextChatService will still use the classic Montserrat font and text sizes… Will experiences that have not been migrated and those that use the legacy version too use that font?
Because current experiences use Builder sans, and for consistency it should be considered to ensure the experiences the the new settings…
I don’t use the old tchat, I don’t use very specifics chat things but as I see, the community have more one Serious reason to make you cancel that update.
You are gonna broke a lot of game and moderate dev for not using the new tchat? Are you crazy? Imagine you have an open public place you don’t remember, and get moderated because it use the old tchat?
Stop right now, a RE-THINK this update.
This is like public sound V.2, serious mistake, breaking a lot of game!
Good change, the old chat system sucks. For the people complaining: 99.9% of games with the old chat don’t have any custom functionality. It will just be migrated to the new UI and won’t break anything. I also HIGHLY DOUBT that they will “moderate” small games with no players for misusing the old API, it sounds like fear-mongering. It’s unlikely they’ll spend resources to police tiny, inactive games with minimal impact.
Beginning to force a migration to the new TextChatService when it currently isn’t on par with the legacy chat system in the first place is absurd. Others in this thread have provided a few examples of that.
I would hope these issues are fully resolved before the new TextChatService becomes mandatory.
Additionally, from the look of the timeline, it seems that even custom chat systems that comply with the new API will eventually be outlawed by April 30th, 2025 in favor of the new TextChatService for everyone. If this is correct, this is once again absurd. Why cannot people have their own custom, compliant chat systems?
It seems pretty explicit that workarounds like this aren’t allowed for any type of chat. Even though GetNonChatStringForBroadcastAsync provides the strictest level of filtering.
But that aside having the chat filter results be like this isn’t ideal, as I would assume using the lesser strict chat filter for things like comments in games would be ideal. Given comments might be like a player giving feedback to another player, ect where comments act as a form of chat.
I would see using the chat filter for comments being useful in games like ClipIt or RecIt.
So simply put, I dont see TextChatService being a end all be all for any user chat-like message filtering. I get why roblox wants this, but it ends up heavily restricting communication in experiences that want to do more with chat. Such as comments, cross-server chat for games that want to have huge servers.
As having 1000 player servers is cool and all as a plan, but itd be much cooler if I could have several 1000 player servers “linked” and have a cross-server proximity chat in a giant survival world for example.
I made a small change from “experience” to “game” in the last line. So don’t be confused why I edited it.
Roblox, That’s the most dumb and stupiest idea ever, I am not gonna migrate from the Old Legacy Chat Service to the new one as the old one helps my players better to chat instead of using the - key to start chatting + I am not going to migrate it also since It’s a classic and legacy feature.
On April 30th, 2025. I will still refuse to use the new message system as I do not tolerate with this change. And with the new guidelines to make a custom chat system, it’s stupid.
I will continue to use the Legacy Chat as always and you do not have the rights to moderate my game or account if you do so.
So we’re… Forced to have less freedom?? lol??
if you could modify LuaChatService (and i WILL keep referring to legacy chat as that) with freedom, I can’t say the same with new text chat service. If I want to add unique features ito it, i likely wont be able to just because we must use this closed-source system.
Oh yeee, I’ve basically made typings for LuaChatService for nothing. Thanks roblox (:
If you can’t read the whole post because of Roblox’s very complicated phrasing and wording I will clear up some stuff on which you may be confused about.
Your account will not be moderated if you can’t integrate to the API or migrate to TextChatService. But rather your experiences (more-so Games) may be moderated some people misinterpreted this as in their account may be moderated.
Not even your custom chat systems are safe from this whether if it uses the legacy chat system forked or not. You HAVE to migrate as seen below:
Don’t know what else to cover as these are generally the main points that are in the post, but I will get into my pet-peeves with this change.
You have to wait 16 days just for this new API (CanUserDirectChatAsync) to release which can make migrating to TextChatService a pain + you are wasting 16 days just to notify developers about it and give them a notice. Why not release it already?
You are allowed to integrate the new API into legacy chat systems or forked ones but because on April 30th you have to integrate to TextChatService all because of parental controls which is a niche point on Roblox’s hands. It would be far better if we were atleast fully allowed to integrate new API into the legacy chat systems and not have to integrate to TextChatService it would still hurt developers, but it would yield a slightly better outcome.
TextChatService has a ton of unnoticed or unaddressed issues that still linger.
What if a developer has a ton of experiences that use legacy chat? They have to go through the pain of manually integrating and migrating those.
Eventually a company has to turn corporate, but they don’t have to make changes that actively hurt their platform’s developers just to keep their investors happy while trying to be transparent with us while also making the most game-breaking change ever.
This could actually become a good thing if Roblox decides to add theme presets to the new chat system including a Retro appearance which just has a identical look to the classic chat system. Roblox, if you’re gonna bring down the legacy chat system then please implement this as an feature. We don’t want to rely on user created content to do this for us.
Man, i don’t even wanna use any of these default chat systems. This is such a poor way to handle parental controls and i have to ask how much planning actually actually went into this. It’s also crazy to me how late these parental control changes are being implemented but hey what can ya do, guess those “Roblox - The Pedophile Hellhole” articles popping up left and right started denting their stocks. I really can’t call this anything other than pure incompetence from roblox.
Either way, let’s be honest here. This is nothing more than a slippery slope for the entire platform. This slippery slope will only lead developers (and further the platform) into some ultra high moderation zone for the sake of “protecting the children” (roblox’s stock) while never actually changing anything in reality. You guys know why you make the money you do from your experiences right? Well surprise surprise, it’s because the parents don’t actually fucking care and you guys already know that. How do i know this? You guys are actively promoting and standardizing the exploitation of children and your biggest developers are LOVING IT. But hey this is all fine since this exploitation is not sexual in nature, right? Who care’s if we are stealing the money of kids, who cares if we are hooking kids up with all tons of addictions, who cares if we are straight up lying in their face to get as much money as possible from their parents? As long as its not sexual then everything is magically A-OK!
If the parents cared then their children would not be playing those child exploitation simulators at all yet, they still are, en masse. This is beyond backwards to me. Large chunk of the platform’s money comes from exploiting kids yet you guys are forcing us to “save da kidz” from being exploited by pedophiles.
Unpopular opinion but maybe you guys should be telling parents to start raising their goddamn kids. I don’t mind these changes being some sort of optional feature parents can enable and developers to implement, but the moment these things are implemented in such a destructive and forceful manner is the moment i will tell roblox and the parents to piss off.
If having these things in games is so important than sure, whatever. Provide the goddamn API’s to allow us to be compliant and expand the experience questionnaire to ask whenever or not the game used fully kitted out chat systems. If not, then simply don’t allow accounts with parental restrictions to access these experiences.
This is straight up comical. Team Chat is quite literarily a proprietary plugin that you and only YOU guys have control over yet have to remove it because the new magic API’s for whatever reason cannot be implemented for it? How the hell would “annonations” and “comments” help with that?
Like 95%+ of your child user-base will never be touching Roblox Studio to begin with yet it’s also affected by all of this? Do you guys believe studio CAN be problematic with the team chat? Or is it fine since you guys would want more free annonations and comments around the place? Won’t people be even more prone to finding those magic annonations and comments than the team chat menu (with how hidden it is in studio)?
