Sometimes, critical bugs can suddenly appear that need immediate attention from our engineering team, because they might have a very negative effect on platform performance.
This post will tell you what kinds of issues fall under this category of critical bugs, and what you should do if your bug report meets these requirements. Please check back often for updates to these requirements.
Requirements for critical bug reports
A critical bug must satisfy at least one of the following criteria: (please refer to sub-items for more information)
- The issue causes crashes or fatal errors halting all meaningful functionality, in Studio or in-game or on the website, that reproduces 100% of the time, with very specific steps, for a significant amount of players / games.
- Only bugs that are fatal and completely prevent any functionality are applicable here, not just any bug that reproduces 100% of the time!
- The bug must affect a very significant amount of players or developers, and must be recently introduced – not something that has been happening for a long period of time for a small portion of players/developers.
- Please do not tag fatal errors or crashes as critical if they only occur in obscure use cases that can be easily worked around for the time being – they can be regular bug reports.
- The issue causes player data loss (through Datastores) or purchase failures (where Robux is taken from the player but the purchase doesn’t go through) at scale across many Roblox games.
- Please carefully check that this is not due to developer error / bad practice first and is actually caused by the platform.
- The issue must be sudden, must happen in multiple games, and it must affect a significant portion of players.
- The issue prevents successful connections to games for a significant percentage of players, to many different Roblox games.
- Has to affect a significant portion of top games, and a very significant percentage of players in all of these games.
- Must be sudden, not something that has been happening over a larger time span.
As usual for bug reports, your topic must follow the posting requirements in How to post a Bug Report. Without the other accompanying details, even a critical issue is going to take longer to identify and resolve. Please include all of the associated information when reporting a critical issue.
Finally, please use common sense to figure out whether something should be marked as critical. If you think it is not of the utmost importance that engineers look at the issue right now and address it, and it can definitely wait until later, you should not tag it as critical.
How to label a bug report as critical
Please include “[ROBLOXCRITICAL]” at the start of the title, only when it meets the requirements above!
Examples of titles:
[ROBLOXCRITICAL] 100% player data loss across all Roblox games when using SetAsync
[ROBLOXCRITICAL] Players cannot connect at all to top game X, Y and Z
[ROBLOXCRITICAL] Fatal error 404 for all website users, preventing all usage of platform
If you are unsure…
Do not use the tag when you are not 100% sure that the issue is critical. Only use the tag when you have confidence that it fully meets the criteria.
Engineers review all bug reports regardless of critical tag, the critical tag just alerts people to the issue quicker. You do not need to add the critical tag just to ensure that engineers see your topic, moreover, that is abusive use of the tag.
When in doubt if your post is critical, please post it first without critical tag, and then feel free to ask @DevEngagementTeam or @Community_Sage for review on whether it should have the critical tag.
Do not abuse the critical tag
We take critical bugs very seriously and will not respond well to spam or inappropriate reports. Abuse of the system will result in punitive measures taken against your forum account. Do not use the critical tag for anything that is not a critical bug.