I partly assume that this is intentional, though I cannot find any reference to that being the case, nor have I seen any posts about it–so I’ve labeled it as a bug.
If anyone is able to enlighten me, that would be much appreciated.
Hi, thanks for flagging!
This was an intentional fix to enhance user privacy.
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Do you think you all could reconsider this? There are many, many communities that have issues with people joining on alternate accounts to mess around, etc. and viewing players’ badges is quite literally the only way to reliably detect people as being an alternate account versus being a main account. I personally profile check dozens of people a day trying to join my community and use their badges to determine whether or not I let them join. This will have a huge impact on communities that try and curate their members a little more than the average group.
In short, people try joining my community on alternate accounts every day, and being able to check people’s badges is the ONLY way to make a determination on someone being an alt or a legit player. This will have a huge impact on my community. I’d love to expand on what I’m saying privately if a staff member wants to reach out.
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Can you explain how Badges are being used to determine alternate accounts? Are you only letting in accounts that have certain badges from your game because that is proof that those players are legitimate?
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I would be very honored to explain, but I’d rather do so privately so the people I intend on keeping out of my communities do not figure out how how to get around all of this. Of course, badges becoming private would ruin that either way, but if there is a possibility for the old way of being able to view everyone’s badges to come back, I’d like to keep it out of public forums. May I message you about it?
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Sure, please do. Let me start a message.
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I posted a mini-guide and an automated script that uses player badges to identify if a user is an alternate account or not. Looking at a user’s profile to see if they’re an alt is common practice in a variety of communities to prevent cheaters, multiple account abuse, degenerates, and other banned users. Badges and other parts of the inventory aid with this determination. Most of the time, if a group does these checks, they’d also enforce an open inventory to come into a community. Hope this helps.
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As an alternative that benefits both sides, can this be a user-set option instead? This way, people who want to use it for alt-detection can just flag anyone who has badges disabled.
A pretty niche set of games even use this, from what I could tell just joining games on an alt account.
Badges are almost the only way to stalk users that have their joins off, so this was a good privacy change executed poorly. A user-set way to disable this would be beneficial to both sides.
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This is a bad idea, in my opinion. While it wouldn’t harm that many people, I believe it would be better to have it as a feature in environments rather than associating it with inventory privacy.
Some people might wish to have their inventory public but their badges private, and others might wish for the reverse—having their inventory private but their badges public. In general, having this as an optional setting would be much better, as some talk about.
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Badges were technically always meant to be private if your inventory was private. Only the most recent 10 badges show publicly for some reason.
It would have been helpful if there had been a forum announcement about this change beforehand, to gather proper quantitative feedback prior to rolling it out. Many bug reports related to the original behavior have been filed over the past few months but were closed for “not a bug.” Now, this change has suddenly been implemented without prior notice. I’m assuming it might be connected to the various privacy features recently deployed as part of the ongoing Roblox event?
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This change makes games and badge hunts that rely on detecting players’ badges using a proxy completely unplayable because it will say they have 0 badges if their inventory is set to private. I would use Roblox’s method of checking if a player has certain badges for my own game, but because I’m checking so many badges, I use up the rate limit incredibly quickly (even when using CheckUserBadgesAsync).
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