As a developer, preventing players from writing inappropriate words with custom Unicode is impossible.
I’ve added a feature that lets players type out text on billboards for a role-play game. However, certain players have been interjecting Unicode letters that look similar to English letters to work around Roblox’s filtering.
Here’s an example: Players could interject letters with french accents (é, ć, ó, ŕ) that look similar to english letters to write inappropriate words in english.
This is not too bad for the chat system where players can easily report users, but for something like a billboard, even if I make it obvious which player wrote the text down so other players could report them, that billboard is still gonna exist in the environment as long as the player is in the game.
The only solution I have at the moment is to remove all non-ASCII characters, which is a terrible solution because that means non-English speakers won’t be able to write their own language on billboards anymore.
It wouldn’t be remotely feasible for Roblox developers to solve this as this a never-ending problem of players coming up with unique combinations to bypass the filters.
As @cpguy5089 said, this has been a daily problem.
If you play Rate My Avatar (like I do) often, then you’ll see it once every 30 minutes or so MINIMUM.
Roblox needs to pay attention, as racial slurs are often used.
I hope they can see this, ASAP.
Hey @aaron_mccoy or @cpguy5089 or @JellyM015, we’re having trouble reproing this internally based on what is in this thread so far, can you send me some specific repro cases in DM and also which API methods related to text filtering you used for each repro case?
Maybe have a whitelist for characters, and use string.gsub to convert them to plaintext for filtering (ä → a, ø → o, etc). It’s a dirty workaround but it will work until roblox fixes their chat filter (probably never)
I mean to send me repro cases of Lua code that reproduce the issue including the engine API used to do the filtering. This will allow us to look into and resolve the issue.
I assume you’re commenting here because you are a creator that is affected by this issue. If you are not and you do not have more specific details, I recommend to refrain from further replying here for the sake of time, we have limited time available for looking into issues.
Can confirm this is a very bad problem for little children that managed to play SCP anomaly breach 2: (this screenshot is just an old funny shot of the game without any bypasses because Roblox is down and I can’t demonstrate but can confirm people can swear in it with its custom chat blocking moderation)
Please refer to above, we need repro cases to be able to patch these issues. If you have a repro case please DM me the specific repro case (specific string you are passing to text filter and it’s not being filtered when you expect it should be).
Screenshots are not helpful because they do not have the raw text being used which might contain hidden Unicode codepoints or similar.
We’ve encountered instances where people also use these methods to send scams on our group walls. Are you able to look into this as well? If so, could provide examples. Assume it uses the same backend filter as well.
Please read the bug report title and description and if it seems similar to your problem then sure, otherwise please create a new bug report and attach private information using the form.
