Phone verification is a proper verification system, or at the very least, it’s being used by some of the largest companies that tend to store the largest amount of sensitive data a person will provide. Roblox is not wrong is following the mainstream practice of phone verification.
How else are you going to get verified? Statistics can easily be forged, while email addresses can be made for free within minutes. Roblox is making the right step into allowing phone number verification, and that is everything they can and should provide.
In terms of receiving text messages for verification, it’s not proper because of sim swapping. In fact, it’s happened before. Last year, the lead developer of Royale High got sim-swapped, thus leading to her account getting hacked.
It’s very good that Roblox supports authentication from third-party apps now. Completely solves the issue with sim swapping.
How is it discriminating? Roblox has no intention of doing that. The reason behind why adding a phone to verify your account is flawed is far from anything to do with discrimination.
I didn’t initially Iike the idea of stuff like this restricted to a program, but this is probably not the best move making it practically public to everyone. Sure, keep allowing everyone to make their plugins paid, but making it discoverable in Studio? I don’t think so, there will be people who will upload malicious plugins, especially as phone verified users also apply to this, you could get an anonymous phone number pretty easily.
Just to clarify, I was someone who got invited recently to the program, but I promise that I have no bias .
This is certainly a big issue currently with not just the plugin marketplace but also UGC; such as clothing, accessories, etc.
Though with plugins it seems even more tedious (due to smaller target audience) and a lot of creators have moved their business over to things like itch.io as roblox currently takes too big of a cut as is. To put this more in perspective you’ll need to upload a plugin at around 1000 robux (more or less) in order to get a roughly same return of 3 usd when published on itch. to some 1000 robux (~10 usd purchase amount) is already too much as that’s just how roblox’s current market is seemingly set that low prices are acceptable (they’re not and aren’t livable either). the current revenue cut seems more than fair for games just not for UGC as they don’t make use of all the resourced roblox provides.
Phone and IDs verification systems are not appropriate in the context of verifying creators whether they are worthy or not. Personally, I have never seen a game dev platform that requires these systems to post your own creations for money.
May I ask you how statistics can be “easily” forged?
On the off chance that you are still using an old fashion non-“smart” phone, the verification process does NOT rely on any modern features. It requires you receive a verification code by message, something all phones can do, going back to the old nokia and prior.
Besides, in the US, all you can really use is smart feature phones (running stuff like KaiOS) since the 2G network has been shut down there on most carriers, and I believe the 3G network is being shut down soon.
If you don’t have a phone, stuff like Talkatone (which is what I use to get a US number), are free. Unfortunately, Google Voice is still US only if you don’t have a Google Workspace account, and besides, it requires a US phone number.
So does one still need to join the Plugin Marketplace program to list their plugins for a price in the marketplace? If so, how do you join the program? Or can one just right click a script in Studio and select Publish… in order to publish a plugin to the marketplace?
People won’t be able to do a physical SIM swap and the only way left to do it is through social engineering with support to get into somebodies cellular account.
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