When searching for an experience in the Roblox Universal App, some private experiences appear in the search results. However, when attempting to access them, they are set as private and cannot be played. These private experiences should not be displayed in search results since they are not accessible to players.
Reproduction Steps
Open the Roblox Universal App.
Use the search bar to look for an experience with a known developer version (e.g., “FIFA World”).
Notice that the main public version of the experience appears in the search results, which is expected.
Scroll through the results and observe that a developer/private version of the same experience also appears.
Click on the developer/private version and see that it is marked as private and cannot be played.
Expected Behavior
Private experiences should not appear in the search results since they are not accessible, only public. Playable experiences should be displayed to avoid confusion.
Hi Juan, thanks for reporting this. It’s currently an expected behavior as we allow recently popular/engaged private results to surface in search. An example for why we do this: When Blox Fruits takes itself private it would be confusing to users if they can’t find it.
Are you or other devs you know looking for ways to completely hide their experiences in Search?
I don’t think I have understood this design because the experiences/games that I have provided as an example in visual aids are not playable or available for anyone to play, only the creator and/or selected players
Taking your example, Blox Fruits is a public and playable version. There is another version for development purposes which is private. Hence, it should only appear “Blox Fruits”, not “Blox Fruits [DEV]”, right?
And when they do find it, it would be confusing for users if they can’t play it.
If it’s meant to be playable, it would be set as such. It’s on the game owner if they want to confuse users by making their game private.
Not to mention, if a creator wants something to be private, it’s supposed to be private, not public.
If they want it to be visible they’d set it accordingly.
Unless private suddenly no longer means private, this is still 100% a bug and unintended behavior.
(srry idk if replying to a fixed bug report is against terms but I wanna share my thoughts on this)
It honestly was a bit weird that private games showed up on results, but I feel like it would’ve been better to have added a “game discoverable” feature that can be turned on and off.
I’ve been able to find a couple open-sources through the search results that I couldn’t find anywhere else, but now I can’t find them anymore because they were set to private. I do like the concept of being able to fully private your games, but now a bunch of private uncopylocked games are lost to abandoned accounts.