Previous Usernames No Longer Show On Profiles

Reeks of a bug. I might report that too just incase :smiling_imp:

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Yeah, guess so, but may as well push for this change rather than the fixing of the original bug because I’ll tell you with absolute certainty I’m getting nowhere if I make a bug report on it :pray:

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I believe you can also get moderated unlimited times if you have a inappropriate avatar since they dont actually reset it (If they ban you at all)

But going back to this bug, this shouldnt be related to DSA since this is a seperate issue

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Yet another pointless update with no advance notice nor opportunity for community feedback.

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did you like, read any other post lol, how would we know it’s an update for sure

Thanks for your feedback — this change is intentional, as we frequently update our safety solutions in an effort to keep users of all ages safe on our platform.

As part of this, we want to let you know about changes going into effect today and over the next several weeks:

  1. Starting today, we are temporarily disabling visibility of previous usernames in user profiles.

  2. We will permanently disable visibility of previous usernames in Search, starting in Early December.

What we’re changing today

In order to prevent users from being able to see violating usernames on the platform, we are temporarily removing the previous username functionality in user profiles. This will occur for usernames regardless of whether they were previously moderated or not.

Previous View vs. View Starting Today

What we’re changing in December

In early December, we will re-enable the ability for users to see previous usernames in user profiles. Instead, we will disable the ability for users to see previous usernames in Search. At that time, when a user types in a specific username into the search bar, and a user profile is displayed, it will no longer appear with the previous username below the existing username. Instead, only the current username will appear below the displayname.

Current View

View in December

45 Likes

This is nice! An announcement would be useful next time, but this change is for the better!

Also:

  • How would this change when they are added back? People will still be able to see these violating past usernames, and people will still be able to make them. It just feels like delaying the inevitable here with this update.
  • Will users have the option to hide/disable these past usernames when they are bought back? I feel like this would improve privacy and safety for everyone, as stated previously by @xyrafrost
  • Wouldn’t this change still enable stalkers etc.? They can still figure out who a person is and always find their presence on Roblox–and keep being able to track them down–through a single username. This wouldn’t really help with security in this scenario. I feel like previous usernames shouldn’t be linked to an account unless a user wants them to be, and it would also free usernames for others to use. More use-cases for this below.
Summary

TL;DR

  • How does this change prevent people from seeing violative usernames, will there be a big filter update in December? for all we know they’ll just come back when past usernames are bought back.

  • Will we be able to hide, release, AND disable searching by previous usernames? This will enable better privacy for users of all ages.

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Will users be able to choose whether to keep their past usernames on their profile private or public in December? If not, please consider giving users the ability to remove the previous username functionality on their profiles.

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I’m worried that this unintentionally empowers stalkers rather than limit them.

While it could be understood that the person being stalked could just change their username, the likelihood of that actually happening feels a lot lower than that of the stalker doing it…

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Is there a reason why the ability for users to see previous usernames in user profiles will be re-enabled in December?

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This is a bad idea, and shouldn’t be permanently removed off the searching tab.

This will encourage scamming, people can now change their usernames to avoid getting called out for something bad they did.

People on the consoles, Desktop app & mobile app are unable to find people’s userIDs and save them, if they need to report a user for scamming them or breaking the rules in other ways.

This is a very bad choice, and they should not be permanently removed.

I understand this is a good “privacy” option, however I think it should only affect the profile page, not the searching tab. I would also think, it would be nice to allow people to turn this on/off in case people want to show their old usernames.

Imagine this scenario: Little timmy gets scammed by “NoobyBoy716”, they change username to something different, now little timmy has no way of finding out who the scammer was and how they can tell their friends to prevent getting scammed. He can also not report him because they can’t find him.

Only users on desktop devices wil be able to save people’s accounts in case they need to ban them, or report them for scamming, or beaking the roblox ToS because they can grab the userid from the url.

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This is honestly quite unnecessary, I really don’t understand why this change was made. Quite useless tbqh

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They can’t.

We already have UserId’s for Roblox to moderate stuff like this. Also I think this is a much worse problem than people who got outright doxxed. Especially considering it costs them 1000 robux every time they want to do this.

The staff member said you’d still be able to search by previous usernames, just not view them on search.

1 Like

I don’t entirely think this is a realistic scenario.
For one thing, I heavily doubt a scammer would be willing to spend 12 bucks just to change their username to avoid being banned. For another, this already is more or less possible if the scammer were to just create a new alt account after every scam. Timmy could get the account banned, sure, but it wouldn’t do anything if it’s no longer in use.

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Also, a better report feature that allows you to report players who left a game would be much more ideal for this scenario and allow this update to happen.

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To be fair 1000 robux is a very minimal amount in today’s economy and I believe many bad actors would not hesitate to spend that cost if it meant avoiding the actions of moderation.

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This is the only mainstream platform that links previous usernames to an account. This can be said for millions of other similar games, and does happen. But I feel like the scenarios that have actually happened are a much bigger problem compared to scammers. You can do the same thing in certain Minecraft servers etc.

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It’s not just scammers that I’m worried about. I was talking about scammed so I won’t have to mention the more messed up stuff, but there’s also a lot of people who are using the roblox platform for illegal things, messed up things which I assume you could figure out what I mean. There’s a lot of those who care about their Roblox accounts and change their usernames alot. It’s going to be harder to identify such people and report them to Roblox now.

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Wouldn’t they just use alts? There are people that join these types of games and report people in it and I’m sure that type of community would know that.

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Not sure, probably you just find one in a random game acting inappropriately or something, and they just happen to change their name soon after that. I heard of cases where people were discovered to be weirdos because of their usernames history, having inappropriate usernames in there.

There’s cases where usernames history would be needed.

By reading the post I understand that in december, Roblox will only censor names that look like real names in your history? I hope that’s the case

And hopefully names api still returns all usernames