(Edit: “Announcements from Admin Commands” is now considered non-chat. All but the last sentence and point 3 before the next quote is out of date.)
Sorry but WHAT?! In the past, we have been given APIs to be compliant with our custom solutions, and now we are just told to “suck it up” and move to TextChatService. I could see using it as a backbone for normal chats, but forcing it to other use cases (like admin broadcast messages, commonly used in clan/security groups) has 3 problems:
- It is not obvious to people who will never see this post, which will be most developers on the platform. New developers won’t notice this years down the line and will immediately be non-compliant.
- How are we even meant to make this work reliably? Create and manage dozens/hundreds of text channels when we previously would just use simple
RemoteEvents? - How will moderation even handle this policy?! A text goes in, gets filtered, and gets displayed. How will moderation know if the game is compliant with
TextChatServiceor not? A heavily stylized or weird chat risks game/account moderation because moderation picked incorrectly. Many non-compliant games will just face no action.
Games that actively rely on admins broadcasting messages (like Innovation Security) have to jump through insane hoops just to keep what we have, and games that don’t update will either break due to the incompatible APIs (Virtual Valley Games risked being in this position a year ago, since we relied on the chat APIs inline with character loading) or… actually, what happens to old games? Will they just become lost media as Roblox closes them down, or will the owner risk account moderation (Edit: later replies suggest games will be taken down, but the owner won’t face action. I hope moderation gets it right.)?
This change is like hammering a nail with the Death Star. It is a massively overcomplicated change with potentially disastrous consequences. Please don’t force this change on us. Give up the APIs we need to be compliant.
With the lockdown of custom chats that aren’t normal chat systems, how can we know this won’t be locked down long-term? I don’t want to implement roleplay names into a game just for someone to give Roblox a reason to ban them in a few months, and then take down my game. And what about people using usernames to dox people? Will presenting usernames have to go through TextChatService as well.
Are there any plans to provide any sort of compatibility layer for games that don’t fork the legacy chat but rely on the APIs? Games as new as a few months from now risk breaking due to incompatible APIs. The performance issues over the past year have steered people away from the TextChatService.
(Edit: Seems like it is a yes based on “Roblox is committed to preserving these legacy experiences.”? The means aren’t specified.)
So, if I don’t update my older games that I haven’t touched in 5 years, I risk account moderation - which potentially affects DevEx standing and knocks out Open Cloud API keys. That is insane. “Lost media” is a massive problem and Roblox is actively helping it instead of stopping it.
(Edit: Confirmed later on that games will be moderated, but not users. Still a concern about growing the pool of lost media.)