Proactive Moderation for UGC items barely works

Bug Reports Catalog Asset Bugs
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Currently the UGC moderation is so bad that we’re having a lot of limited inspired items being published, 1:1 copies & very inappropriate items passing the moderation.

Roblox limited inspired items & 1:1 copies:

One of the biggest issues with this is that people are being mislead into thinking items such as “Dominus”, “Domino crown” & other roblox-inspired items are allowed on the platform.

The result of this is 100+ dominus & domino crown items being uploaded daily.
Roblox’s only response to this situation was deleting all of these items in waves, using their DMCA system, which is very flawed because this gets users terminated.

Now the biggest problem with these terminations, is that ALOT of these users, tried to archive/remove the items that they’ve uploaded & that many users are mislead into thinking this is allowed. My sister thought the same and now her account was being bombed with item deletions, because of the proactive moderation being basically inexistent.

I understand why Roblox is taking action and I agree that action should be taken, however this is not the way.
She’s been actively trying to remove all of these items, just to get banned for it? It’s unfair that users are unable to take down content if they believe that this content is within Roblox’ gray area, due to them being allowed by the UGC moderation. (no surprise support couldn’t help)
2 of these items: 114607875207032, 85418124205836. her username is @maxrfrax

How can we fix this? Users should not be terminated, but banned instead for up to 7 days OR given the choice to remove the items & pay the refunds.

Check rolimons for recently deleted items:

Notice how most items use custom meshes inspired by roblox’ mesh

Similar posts:

Inappropriate items:

This issue should be self explainatory, but I will be talking about it anyways.
Due to the Proactive moderation being basically inexistent, people are able to upload “MAP” flags, inappropriate faces disguised as innocent faces and more.

Some stuff that I noticed is being ALLOWED despite being against the ToS of roblox are:

  • Dating-related items
  • Political & war related items (used to mock a certain political party, make fun of an active war, etc)
  • Predatory items (the “MAP” flag & other symbols used by people who are doing illegal stuff)
  • Faces inspired by high people, with their eyes symbolizing that they’ve been consuming illegal substances
  • Inappropriate slangs/expressions
  • Exaggerated proportions which people use in sexual ways

UGC Copies of other users:

In Conclusion:

I think the UGC’s upload checks & moderation deserve an overhaul, to prevent people from uploading stuff that should be against the rules. A lot of users would be tricked into uploading roblox-inspired or copied items, which is clearly against the ToS, however because there’s no prevention, this will mislead users into thinking it’s allowed, keeping their items up for what could be months, years even & then get their account deleted. Not to mention that Roblox will also have to refund the item out of their own pocket because the creator probably devexed the earnings already, meaning Roblox is at a big loss by allowing this to happen.

I personally believe Roblox should be less harsh on creators that uploaded inspired items & take more action on people who upload inappropriate stuff & also have a better proactive moderation that PREVENTS this kind of items from being uploaded

I believe that the current moderation was supposed to work & it’s currently broken as it shows no signs of preventing people from uploading things.

Expected behavior

I expect that the Proactive moderation prevents items that are supposed to be against the ToS from being uploaded.

People don’t even need to bypass in order to upload items that violate the ToS.

A private message is associated with this bug report

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yeah, hoping more posts will rise more concerns, theres legit almost no moderation to uploading items, so they have to do something & prevent people from uploading stuff that will get them banned months later

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One of the big examples I know of is proactive moderation on bundles and dynamic heads. For example, if you upload a dynamic head with a tattoo (which isn’t allowed), it will usually get approved, but it will get deleted several hours later I assume by a moderator who goes through approved items. You can notice this issue using Rolimon’s.

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I think the worst part about it is not only will Roblox lie to you and tell you in no uncertain terms that "No strike or moderation action should be applied to your account as a result of this request. If you receive a strike or moderation action, please reply to this email and we will assist you further." as well as "we aim to complete all such requested removals within 30 days of receipt of the request"

Those items will not only never get archived/taken down (request acknowledged 19 march 2023, content archived 10 april 2024, and even that was entirely luck) but when you do get a strike/ban from a claim on the items, Roblox will swear up and down on their entire bloodlines souls on 3 different stories: “You never requested that specific item to be taken down”, “That ticket is for a different issue” and “That ticket doesn’t exist” (even though all three are in a triangle of contradicting eachother, with all of them being objectively false, they WILL regularly swap between those three stories)

It’s not just that the mods are deliberately negligent, but the fact they go out of their way to deny any wrongdoing until the very end (ban 25th may 2023, unbanned 7th jan 2024 as a “one time exception”, implying the entire time they had done nothing wrong. note how it still took another 2 months for the content to be removed after that even though again I was told it would be “as soon as possible” despite being almost an entire year after the first 30 days were up)

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Absolutely ridiculous that this is still happening, many people requested removal for inspired items in good faith and many of them are people who have just gotten their first DMCA’s. They deserve a warning at most. Termination and ending people’s careers is overkill. Roblox should treat people’s accounts with more respect as it is their livelihoods

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Just got my account banned for 3 days for uploading what I thought was original enough because it initially passed moderation. 177 days after uploading, 3 days short from intending to archive the item I get moderated.
To make things worse, since I thought that Roblox was OK with what I uploaded, I wanted to make slight changes to my UGC and because I can’t change the mesh I uploaded two more of the same item with changes which might just make my account a ticking time bomb before getting a third strike at some point and terminating my account. This is ridiculous Roblox. Moderate the items before they end up in the marketplace, and I don’t mind if this means that it will take significantly longer for items to be approved.

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I absolutely hate the way Roblox is handling this too - the only response we ever got from the megathread “Roblox sending DMCA takedowns” were victims getting emails from copyright_agent exerting their authority over them, telling them they had absolutely no possibility of countering their DMCA strike.
Well, that breaks the law…

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Half, if not even a majority of these items being deleted are very obviously handcrafted in a way that makes them unique to their niche, whether that be maintaining a high quality, leaning towards the appeal of a fandom, whatever it may be, they were custom. But no, let’s just ignore the peasants complaining on the DevForum, here’s a half assed email telling you we won’t appeal anything you made.

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Thank you for the report. We have assigned to our team for further review.

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Asking Roblox to be less harsh when taking action is not a bug. They are within their rights to do so and may choose to take action on your account based on what’s outlined in the Terms of Use and Community Standards. The reason for the action has already been acknowledged in the original post, so I won’t go over that point again since it’s already understood.

It’s also stated in the post that Support was not helpful. Under Section 11 of Roblox’s User Terms, you can seek a resolution directly with Roblox. This path is mentioned frequently and often requires you to include “the ticket or case number provided by Roblox Support to track previous attempts to resolve the Dispute, if there is one” when submitting a MIDR for further investigation. If there is still a dispute between you and Roblox, this is the route you should take.

There’s a section in the report specifically dedicated to items that are considered inappropriate or violate the rules. If you believe an asset violates any of Roblox’s Terms or additional Terms, you should report it using the proper method. This link explains how to do that:
https://en.help.roblox.com/hc/en-us/articles/203312410-How-to-Report-Rule-Violations

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I think this post is specifically addressing the inconsistencies in what Roblox moderation deems a copy - not very long ago staff didn’t seem to mind original yet similar items to things Roblox had uploaded, now items that very vaguely resemble things like a Domino crown or a Dominus are being deleted, yet still being allowed through moderation (if they should have had action taken on them, it should have been originally taken through the upload queue)

I appreciate that you give us a guide on how to address situations like these to Roblox, but it seems like you list the rule violations article in every instance where Roblox moderation is addressed. If it was that easy to report and takedown these item breaking the ToS creators wouldn’t be talking about it.

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In future create a bug report for each separate issue by the way, you’ve put 3 different issues here so it’s going to be harder for engineers to meaningfully address each of them and for the discussion to stay centered

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The main post is not about roblox moderation being less harsh. it’s about roblox moderation not working when uploading ugcs, causing many people to upload stuff that shouldn’t be uploaded, and then roblox taking harsh actions against them.

According to the ugc upload moderation, you are allowed to upload dominus items, or 1:1 copies which roblox does nothing to prevent.
Alot of roblox users are kids who get very easily misleaded into thinking they should be allowed to do that, or users who are being lied to by others to upload dominuses & limited copies for them, getting their account banned.

Despite the ToS saying you’re not allowed to upload certain stuff, there’s little to no prevention for it.
The rest I mentioned (users uploading dominuses and being moderated) are just casuses of this moderation not working properly. Nobody would receive a DMCA moderation if they couldn’t upload the item to begin with. Also people get to profit for months bcs of this & roblox has to refund people out of their own money.

Roblox’ moderation can’t and will never be perfect, but it shouldn’t be so easy to upload stuff that’s against the rules. You’re not even bypassing them, they just pass the moderation checks. Which they shouldn’t, and that’s what this post is about.

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All of the issues are mostly causes of the main issue, which is proactive moderation for ugc not working.

People can upload anything and there’s only a small chance the moderation will do a good job at moderating.
The very obviously inappropriate things will be banned, however other stuff will not. MAP flag, certain symbols associated with ww2 germany & more than that will be approved without the users trying to bypass.

As for limited copies, those will also get approved with little to no changes to the mesh, and because the moderation does nothing to prevent those, people will think it’s okay. This is already a gray area when it comes to uploading. More and more people will see them uploaded into the catalog, to the point they will start thinking it’s okay to do it and therefore lot’s of users upload like atleast 5 limited copies or items inspired by such, and then they get terminated because of it. This causes a very big confusion for many users

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not to mention those “headless” and “korblox” accessories that promise those items but are just scams where the accessory just goes inside the avatar’s head or torso. you can find them all over the catalog.

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According to Roblox’s Marketplace Policy under the General Creation Guidelines, uploading 1:1 copies isn’t allowed, despite what was claimed. You can read it here: Marketplace policy | Documentation - Roblox Creator Hub

This seems more like a complaint that moderation doesn’t meet your expectations and that items you see as DMCA violations aren’t being removed during the initial review, again claiming that Roblox moderation “isn’t working.” Like I said before, if you find content that violates the rules, you can report it, and I linked how to do that in my last reply.

Making a bug report every time you see a guideline violation isn’t what engineers are expecting in this category. The roadmap also mentions that moderation improvements are still in progress, so make sure to use the proper channels next time.

I feel like I have to repeat myself but Roblox is fully within its rights to issue takedowns against users uploading items that infringe on their own copyrighted content. This is allowed under the Terms of Use and there is nothing wrong with that so it can’t be considered a bug.

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I’m not claiming that roblox taking items down is a bug, again, this is not a bug however this thing only happens because roblox’s proactive moderation is not working, which is a bug

This is invalid because roblox’ DSA reports will not take down all of these dominus items.
I’ve seen and reported dominus items using DSA reports but Roblox’s response was that the item is not in violation of Roblox rules, again their moderation is being inconsistent.

Not claiming 1:1 copies are allowed at all, however since this shouldn’t be allowed, the proactive moderation should be expected to delete these items before they get uploaded into the marketplace. Again, there is no proactive moderation, it barely works and when it works, it’s only for a few things, allowing a lot of other things to pass through.

This is not a matter of “oh people did it wrong they should be banned” or no, this is a matter of Roblox’s moderation being inconsistent, and not preventing people from uploading such things.

If somebody uploads a dominus and it doesn’t pass moderation, they will not do it a second time.
If it gets approved, they will keep uploading, and roblox will have to take the item down. Roblox has it’s full rights to take the item down, however issues arise when people are trying to take the item down themselves. (Roblox ignoring previous removal requests, despite users being told otherwise)

Maybe someone got tricked into uploading a dominus to somebody’s group for a large sum of robux. If this user later finds out what they did is against the rules, they have no way of correcting this mistake, and all of this happened because Roblox’ moderation didn’t prevent them from uploading.

If they got a warning/ban mentioning: “You tried to upload something aginst the tos”, they wouldn’t attempt it a second time, no matter what amount of robux they’re offered to upload this item

Not to mention roblox takes down inspired items too.

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This item uses original assets, custom mesh & texture, however it’s similarity is what got it banned. This shouldn’t happen as the asset is completely original. Empyror’s post explains better Roblox shouldn’t take down inspired items. Good Faith Takedown System for UGC Creators (Protection from Strike Accumulation)

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The Digital Services Act is not meant for reporting IP-infringing content, and Dominus copies are out of scope. You shouldn’t be able to do that, which is why I have to mention the correct channel three times already.

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DSA reports are meant to be used to anything that violates Roblox rules, including copies of roblox items.

While IP-infringing content itself is not meant to be reported through DSA, the “other” option allows users to report items for breaking Roblox’s Marketplace rules. Mentioning which rule these items violate is important.

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You could for example mention that the item is meant to be a 1:1 of a limited. Since this is itself a violation of Roblox’ rules, there’s no reason for DMCA strikes to be involved.
These violate Roblox’ rules because they’re meant to be Roblox Limited items, not because of IP laws & should be reported as such.

However, this post is not about the DMCAs & IP violation, this report is meant to bring awareness to roblox staff that the UGC uploading moderation is not working as intended, allowing items into the catalog that shouldn’t be allowed.
The proactive moderation is not working here because it’s supposed to prevent such items from being uploaded.

A dominus should not be approved to begin with

Other things mentioned in the post, are causes of this proactive moderation not working, and they should also be corrected

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How is this item still available on the avatar shop when you can’t say the word in chat or even look it up in the search bar without being tagged?
Sware Word

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