Just coming back and bumping this to support it. I had no idea how much of a problem this was until recently.
I’m always flustered when someone steals my game, which is a difficult task, and is impossible with the right tactics. But if I were a clothing designer, this would make me hopeless, I might stop making clothing.
I think the “merit system” (similar to models) sounds like it could work. Does anyone know how well that’s worked for models (original vs copied)? I’m unsure how well it’d work when there’s actual money involved. Skids are innovative.
There’s also gotta be a way to undo the damage that these bot groups have done, right? The groups are terminated and the owner madeoff with the loot, but now users are stuck with thousands of pages of the exact same item.
The problem is probably the scale at which it happens. Roblox’s options are to check for exact matches which can by bypassed by changing a pixel, or checking for a % match which would involve comparing the asset to tons of others on the site (requires too many resources). If you report the clothing, can prove you’re the original owner, and Report Abuse works, the copy should be taken down like in the linked tweet.
It’s been seven months now, and nothing has been said or done - even to the links in the thread! Navigating the catalog is impossible today, and it seems that the blatant mistreatment given to this issue has started to pay off:
Clothing botters realized that the search algorithm prioritizes word hit count over actual relevance, and more discoveries might be made;
The tags are constantly updated to reflect the most popular search terms (in some way?);
There are over TWO MILLION pages of copied clothing, which are potentially occupying disk space that could be used for other asset types and data! Would we really need the transition to int64 if this issue had been mitigated sooner?
This has completely blown out of proportions, and it can’t stay the way it is. It is killing a whole segment of creators while enriching burglars. I would say it is at least disrespectful to the artists’ intellectual properties, not to say it is exterminating them.
Artists are not DevExing out of their work, but botters apparently are? If not through the official process, they are via the limited black market which moves thousands of dollars every year in cover, possibly influencing the whole platform which could give some nasty headaches to the company as it happened to VALVE with the whole gambling incident last year.
I acknowledge that there are open job listings for engineers specialized in dealing with botting, but this is something that only recently has started affecting major websites and still has to come a long way before we start graduating people in this regard - here, the situation needs to be fixed in an immediate manner.
There are plenty of threads with possible solutions. This one, for example, has some, and searching “clothing” in the Developer Forum search bar will yield multiple hits from many different members of the community: some influential and respected, others not so big but with great ideas.
As EgoMoose said in his post, the process doesn’t need to be perfect, but good enough to discourage shady members from spending their resources pursuing this goal. You don’t need to wait for people specifically graduated in the area to deal with the problem, but instead, good ideas need to be applied.
Thanks for reading this post. I apologize for any grammar mistakes.
It is possible to detect highly similar images without expensively comparing one to millions of others.
A perceptual hash could be generated and stored with every clothing asset, and a select query could be run whenever a new clothing asset is being created to determine if that article has already been uploaded. The hash should only look at the visible parts of the template (hardwiring the template to the system unfortunately), and the resulting image only needs to be scaled down enough to mitigate pixel changes, minimizing inaccurate predictions. This would still allow color shifts and modifications through, unfortunately. Assets detected as being reuploaded too many times should be flagged to at least never show up in search.
This is still a major issue, clothing creators are artists too, and at the very least we should have the right to take down stolen clothing if no other solution is available
