Moderating player-published outfits: where do you draw the line?

I’m making an avatar shopping game. Players can publish their outfits to a public feed, and other players can browse them, wear them, and buy the items.

Names and tags are already filtered with TextService. My two open problems are about the outfits themselves:

1. What counts as “bad”?

Every item is from the Roblox Marketplace, so each item is technically allowed. But a combination of allowed items can still make an outfit I don’t want kids scrolling past. Where do you draw the line? For example:

  • Normal bikini / beach swimwear — fine or not?
  • Very revealing / lingerie-looking outfits — I assume no, but where exactly does “revealing” start?
  • Bodysuits or skin-tone clothing that looks nude in the thumbnail
  • Shirtless classic torso
  • “Sexy costume” stuff (maid, bunny) with normal coverage
  • Gore / horror — normal Halloween seems fine, but how much blood is too much?

If your game has player-published content: what’s your list of “not allowed”, and how do you word it so it’s clear to players and mods?

Also — does a dataset or category list for this already exist anywhere? Like a shared taxonomy of “bad outfit” types, a reviewer rubric, or a blocklist of asset ids that are always trouble in combinations. To be clear, I mean labels and category definitions only, not actual content. I’d rather not invent this from scratch if someone has already done the work.

(Please just describe things in words — don’t post images of bad outfits here.)

2. What’s the best way to actually moderate it?

The options I see:

  • Everything publishes instantly, players report bad ones, I review reports
  • New players’ publishes wait for approval, trusted players go live instantly
  • Everything waits for approval (probably too slow?)
  • Auto-check somehow (asset blocklists, or screenshot the outfit and run it through an image moderation API)

What have you actually used, and what went wrong with it? Also, is there anything built into Roblox (AvatarEditorService, Open Cloud, anything) that helps with this beyond text filtering?

Thanks — real experience beats theory here, even from small games.

1 Like

depends of your game maturity, if its set to “all ages” - ban everything you provided as example (swimwear, revealing outfits, gore, etc.), if its 13+/17+, you could pass basic bikini, and gore/horror that are not too violent, skin-tone clothing should be banned no matter what, shirtless classic torso depends, on male its pretty ok, on female it’s pretty similar to skin toned clothing, maid/bunny costume is okay, pretty much nsfw/extremism/hate or nudity should be banned, everything else is fine if your game maturity is set to 13+/17+

also, there’s no public list of “bad outfits”, for moderation system it vary, here’s some variants with pros and cons
instant publishing + reporting
pro: high engagement
con: hundreds of children will see an inappropriate outfit during the first 10–15 minutes if the game is popular, this almost guarantee ban of your game

full pre moderation
pro: full safety for your game
con: it kills the UGC mechanic entirely, if the moderator is asleep or a response takes two hours, the player will simply leave the game

“trust levels” something
if a player has less than X hours of playtime or a newly created account, their outfits undergo a review process or a delay, and if a player has established status, a verified history, and no bans, publishing happens instantly (which would go off on compromised accounts or bot farm where they mass upload innocent avatars and then mass upload nsfw or stuff)