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

I really hope the performance issues with the new chat will be solved before the old chat is entirely removed

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What about games where the developer has quit the platform completely or has no access to their account with legacy games?

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Not all LegacyChatService APIs have even been given TextChatService replacements yet. Please make sure that developers can actually migrate everything before LegacyChatService is removed!

Here’s an example I brought up over a year ago, I’m sure there are plenty more.

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Just to clarify, we are not planning to moderate users unless we see users intentionally trying to create new chat experiences that don’t comply with our new guidelines. We only plan to take action on the experience itself.

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More importantly, will private games be moderated? I sure hope not…

(Message by somebody else.)

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I hate this change :+1:
The new chat lacks a lot of features compared to legacy, and I find it REALLY ugly and impractical. Lol.

edit: why cant we just have functions and events that allows us to make our own chats? a SendMessage function and a ReceiveMessage event… ugh

edit: i misread the post, this is actually a decent update LOOL

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I welcome this change and I think it is in the best interest of Roblox to move away from the current “two-chat” system they have created by allowing people to choose between LegacyChatService and TextChatService. The old chat system’s code is really bad and it’s about time more experiences started adopting the new chat.

But what engineers often fail to acknowledge is that there’s a reason why people haven’t migrated to TextChatService. In fact, there are several:

  • Objectively worse performance (backed up by several DevForum bug report posts)
  • UI takes up more space and covers UI on the side that the previous chat box did not
  • No way to allow users to customize the size of the window
  • No channel bar to allow users to switch between text channels easily
    • Although it has been announced in this post that this is being added soon, so this will soon no longer be a reason not to migrate
  • RichText formatting issues
  • RichText interference with other APIs such as Player.Chatted
  • No automated way to migrate things like chat tags from LegacyChatService to TextChatService
  • Some widely-used legacy APIs are completely missing from TextChatService

Roblox needs to address these issues before expecting people to migrate, let alone forcing them to. These are issues developers have been talking about since the release of TextChatService in 2021, with several unresolved bug reports about most of the issues. It’s time to start prioritizing the things that are putting people off migration in the first place. I have no doubt that Roblox will do so over the next few months, and their commitment is promising.

One of the biggest concerns is how this can potentially break old games, especially those created by developers who have either left the platform or even passed away. If Roblox is going to force migration to TextChatService, how do they plan to rectify the issues that many games will face in scripts awaiting the ChatServiceRunner? This module doesn’t exist with TextChatService and scripts will require manual edits to migrate away from it. Will these games just be left in the dust?

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The majority of experiences using legacy chat are using the standard version of legacy chat and will have until April 30. 2025 to migrate to TextChatService. As mentioned in the post, we’re exploring ways to auto-migrate old inactive experiences but may not be able to do this for all experiences.

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are games that are private still gonna be affected, by moderation or otherwise?

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Oh, alright! Thanks for the clarification, I was worried I might get moderated for experiences that I haven’t been developing on for years. Thanks for letting me know

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roblox are you crazy?! there are thousands of games that use the classic chat and you make this change. what about people who can’t update their game (like me)? this is the worst change i’ve ever seen in roblox.

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amazing they’re removing team chat just what I needed, and they’re moderating people too when they could JUST have only privated the games or something (even though that’s also kind of stupid imo)

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Just to clarify we will not be moderating people only taking action on the experiences.

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This is a terrible idea. Thousands of games rely on the Legacy Chat service, and may not be updated now. Same applies to many discontinued experiences (or games with inactive developers) who use custom chat systems. The effects of this update will be DISASTROUS on many older experiences.

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What about privated games? I have way too many games on my profile that use LegacyChatService (Literally check my inventory), will they be moderated???

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i have so much games using legacy, inactive games will be moderated??

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this post already gives developers a warning 3 months in advance of this update happening. if you somehow cannot find the time to update your games in that long of a time then that’s kinda on you at that point.

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Can I ask what means Moderate like remove game? ban the developer?
Will this also happen for private games or just some public testing games that I’m using for testing purposes?

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I have 0 intention of going through all 500+ places I have created over the past 15 years on the site to update something that can quite easily be automated.

Please explain what you mean by “Moderation” in reference to the games which do not comply, since most of my games are just for development and working on assets to go into a finalised project, will I lose all of my work?

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For me I feel like the main issue here is the fact that it applies to all games, which brings up the concern of games which are inactive on the developer’s half which have these older systems. What will happen to them? With these changes being put in place said games would end up just being lost to time due to the developers being missing and the game getting taken down due to not following the policies.

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