I’ll be honest, I wasn’t really speaking specifically on the discord issue, but more so how they’ve been issuing warnings all around for stuff that’s 4+ years old. I might’ve let a bit more inner rage about the current issues slip out than intended.
It’s fine unless they’re going to ban all of their front page games.
An approval process wouldn’t have much success. Even if a Discord server is okay upon review, a month from now the community moderators maybe aren’t as active and inappropriate content becomes rampant. It wouldn’t be feasible to approve a Discord server without realtime moderation from the staff, which in turn isn’t feasible either.
We might have success with limiting Discord links to 13+ users (which is already done to Facebook on profiles).
If this is concerning Roblox’s image rather than compliance for legal reasons, it may be why Discord’s moderation was deemed inadequate. Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook are all big names – parents use these sites themselves and are comfortable with them. Discord is relatively new, and isn’t as well-understood.
I can imagine linking to your Twitter or Twitter posts will be fine as long as you don’t have a (pinned) post with a link to your Discord/other non-approved service and then linking to that directly.
Better go ban Phantom Forces and the entirety of the SyLiS development team.
This is a little illogical. Games with guns, blood, killing and relatively mature content are allowed on the site (and even promoted/streamed) but a text program is banned? I’m quite sure that the majority of Discords are properly moderated to keep out inappropriate content save for very few servers with NSFW channels (don’t know why you’d even make one). Let’s not forget that Discord has become a community staple and has good things like
(without a role because its relatively small right now)
(bots with moderation capabilities)
…and so much more.
But hey, all the points for and against Discord’s ban are mostly all good. I’m just a guy sitting here wanting to post and talk on this topic.
If not Discord, then we need better ways to convey our information and to have a better outreach with our individual communities, such as this feature request.
EDIT: Also another point:
Roblox removed the guest system and requires you to sign in as well to play games and view content now.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
You can use Report Abuse if you believe that content on the website violates the TOS.
I’m willing to be that what he said was sarcasm and he was expressing the fact that the rule is completely terrible as many innocent developers would be banned for no reason.
Nice…?
I did a little investigation - turns out (theoretically, if these rules are to be enforced) we can start to say goodbye to the frontpage.
Reasoning
The marked games either uses gyazo / prntsc links on the developer’s Twitter timeline (directly available from their Twitter, not a retweet, not switching to “with_replies”), or mentions Discord somehow on either their Twitter timeline, Roblox group or other medium accessible from the game page. Descriptions with @twitterHandle are also included.
Though obviously this won’t happen - but it does give some insight as to what impact this rule has on Roblox’s community.
I guess I gotta start Reporting Abuse now as I want to follow the rules.
/shrug
As someone who owns a Discord server with tens of thousands of members, it doesn’t need to be stated that I disagree with this move.
However, I’m going to state it anyway.
This is silly. Discord, when compared to Twitter or YouTube, actually has the best child-safety tools. There are built-in screening filters that use risk analysis to ensure almost all dangerous content is filtered on servers that opt in. On top of that, there are numerous bots that add even more security functionality.
Developers should be allowed to link to their own secure servers from within their games. Filter it on the website. Filter it in chat. But don’t prevent us from putting it in our games.
This policy needs to be looked at again. Almost every developer uses discord to interact with their community. Discord is actually safer than twitter and youtube, as it requires you to sign in to view content.
Discord allows you to write bots, which can have moderation capabilities. Most if not all discord servers have moderators that keep unsafe content out.
Seriously, this is a really horrible way of ‘protecting’ players <13.
Well said berezaa! I agree 100% of the way. What about the ROBLOX Discord itself? This is yet another disappointing update. berezaa isn’t the only one that owns a huge server as well. Anime and Manga Club which about won a bloxy last year not only has 50k+ in their group but over thousands of users in their discord would rely on such a feature to increase the member count in the discord.
Does this have to do with the fact that the “Roverify” bot has been breached twice (last one being a few days old) because the devs just don’t seem to get the idea to not store passwords whatsoever.
I do not like that if there is no solution made the decision always comes back to limiting us in some kind of way.
You can always contact discord regarding those malicious bots as well as far as I am aware to get those removed and the creators (hopefully) banned as well.
Please do not make this “solution making” a trend.
This honestly seems a little overprotective to me.
Games on ROBLOX that include blood, guns, violence and murder are all completely fine (and some even streamed on the ROBLOX twitch channel) however Discord is not? I get the fact that these games are usually cartoony and aren’t that realistic but the aim of the game is still there.
Most (if not all) Discord servers that are advertised on popular games have rules and moderators to make sure no NSFW content (or similar) is posted, it’d make more sense if certain discord servers are not able to be linked if they had:
- NSFW channel(s)
- No rules regarding swearing etc.
I really think this should be reconsidered, Discord is a great platform for user-user/user-dev/dev-user interaction, bug reporting, game update notes and much more, it is also incredibly easy to navigate and use.
Discord also has quite a few measures to ensure child safety (as berezaa stated above) and making a bot to filter out harmful messages is incredibly easy to do, public bots that do the same are also available for those who don’t know how to make their own bots.
In short, Discord is not harmful (99% of the time) and can be compared to Twitter, YouTube etc. when it comes to child safety, in some ways it’s better than Twitter or YouTube because you need to have an account to view anything/join servers. At the very least allow developers to link discord servers for their games in a group or game description or even better, make an option to allow game developers to link Discord servers to games and make it only viewable by 13+ users. (and maybe include that option for groups, too)
I have a question.
If a developer doesn’t mention discord in any way whatsoever on Roblox, but mentions it on his/her twitter without using any links but instead discord server codes on his/her twitter only, would he or she be susceptible to moderation on Roblox?
This is assuming the developer hasn’t linked their Twitter account on their profile using Roblox’ feature located in settings, but instead posts their Twitter username to help players find them on Twitter. No links of any kind to their Twitter.
By how they are talking, only if you linked your twitter page to Roblox or something.
I agree, this just makes Twitter / YouTube a proxy for anything else at this point. No one wants to be punished over this either.
However, I believe they should control some of this content as much as they can in-game. Since <13 users can still technically see a Discord invite key or something that is not approved.
Sure, thats fine. If people are circumventing the filter by providing a key then that needs be moderated because they can’t filter it properly. But if they’re just trying to keep <13 users away from discord, they should allow 13+ users to post discord links and those links should be filtered from <13 users.
Does this mean that Discord webhooks will be blocked as well?