I’ve seen a lot of users complain about clothing bots, and I totally get it. It’s currently impossible to find new and interesting clothing, and developers often see their clothes get posted elsewhere, reducing their profits heavily. This problem is also a severely limiting factor in profit because it incentivizes creators to put every clothing item they make on sale for 5 robux so that users won’t search for copies. The whole point of having multiple pricing options for items is not to just sell everything for the minimum amount possible and hope it gets more popular than the botted copies.
I’ve thought a lot about this, and came up with an idea. Why not take clothing offsale if ROBLOX moderation has already found their efforts to be a violation of the Terms of Service? This would mean that, ideally, terminated users won’t be able to sell clothes.
The search page of the catalog for pretty much any search term looks like this:
As you can see, nothing but the same three pieces of clothing all around. The original creator of this piece is nowhere to be found, and even if they were, you’d have to sift through thousands of articles of clothing just to find them. This is the ‘Relevant’ sort, which at least has clothing relevant to the search term. If you use the other sorts, you’ll find lots of popular items that have one or two of the words you searched in their description, but are otherwise completely unrelated.
I’ve gone through the painstaking, manual process of highlighting every clothing item which would be taken offsale if my suggestion was applied.
Red = Locked group
Orange = Group with terminated owner
Blue = Group with no owner
Yellow = Terminated uploader (I take this as the last person to update the clothes, because there was previously no incentive to hide the original uploader, but if this is implemented, the person who uploads the offending material should be judged in this case)
As you can see, this would eliminate over 88% of copied/botted clothes. Not all of them, obviously, but a considerable dent. Of the 7 remaining unhighlighted items on this page, 4 were uploaded by the same user, who I won’t name here, but should probably get terminated. It also wouldn’t be that hard to add a section in the report dialogue for groups labeled ‘This group was primarly used to steal and resell clothing’ to get them locked.
There is one catch with this suggestion, though. It’s easy to run through the 5 million or so groups, isolate the locked ones and those with terminated owners (which I wouldn’t estimate being over 100,000) and take all their items offsale. However, as far as I know, there’s no way to get which groups a user has submitted clothing to, and even less of a way to easily take offsale every clothing item uploaded by a terminated user. You’d be stuck either having to sift through every single user, or sift through every single item. I think the latter is easier, but still very difficult.
However, the other items (red, orange, and blue) aren’t that difficult to sort out as described above.
Please let me know any of your thoughts on this issue. Constructive criticism is always welcome, and I may have not thought out everything I should have.