As a developer, it’s difficult to receive feedback from players so that I can improve my game. Discord is a major asset for this, and thankfully after the most-liked thread on the forum took the community by storm, allowing Discord to be added to a game’s social media links is now on the roadmap. Unfortunately, we cannot specifically mention the word “Discord” still:
Blocking Discord links outside of the provided social media section is fine, as it allows control over who can view the link. Blocking the word “Discord” would be fine as well if it stopped people from sharing Discord links, but it doesn’t.
Blacklisting the word “Discord” doesn’t stop users from linking to Discord servers outside of the social media section. I’m extremely disappointed that we ignored all we learned so far. The whole reason we moved to the current text filter was because blacklisting did not work, and moderation has plenty of experience with Imgur bypasses e.g. /Hjsdfsd.png – at this point we should know full well that blacklisting the name of a site does nothing to make the site safer.
This is not something that can be fixed by continually updating the blacklist with variations – the entire reason we moved to the new text filter was because that’s what we used to do and it didn’t work. Malicious users invented bypasses faster than we could blacklist them. Since blacklisting “Discord” does not make the site safer, it should not be blacklisted, hindering legitimate communication such as “You may provide feedback through Discord linked in the social media section”. Please do not make the site more difficult for legitimate developers to use when we’re not actually making the site any safer.
I agree. Many people are resorted to finding clever ways around the loophole, I often say “this cord” when I’m trying to tell a friend that I have Discord to go check Discord for a message. Given the upcoming repeal of that the blacklist (to some degree) of Discord (both the word and the name), why should the word still be blacklisted?
Discord links were blocked due to safety issues, but soon we will be able to link our servers in the social media sections of games which will allow Roblox to control who can view the links. Roblox blocked the word “Discord” in an attempt to prevent users from sharing links, but as you can tell it doesn’t help.
I am bumping this as it is still very very pertinent.
There is no good reason Roblox should be filtering the word “Discord” for >13 users. It makes communication in game related to discord extremely difficult, such as “check discord” or “our discord invite is”. This hurts games by preventing them to grow their recurring community through social media apps partially.
If a user really wants to, they can already just mention discord with simple bypasses, and since this is a word that is already publically visible on the roblox page itself, it makes no sense that it should be filtered on roblox chat.
Please, remove discord from the chat filter. This filter has been hurting games for way too long.
although “check discord” is valid, i do have to say that a discord invite through chat shouldn’t be allowed, as roblox strictly has discords under groups and games for a reason
but yeah, please, remove discord as a blacklisted word! there are WAY more innocent uses for “discord” than malicious. cmon roblox, you could really do better.
I agree, the term “Discord” should be unblacklisted along with other social media for players without safechat. As long as the user is 13+, it’s fair for them to mention platforms such as this.
With this argument, ROBLOX should ban Discord completely. ROBLOX is being hypocritical by blocking the use of talking about Discord while also allowing groups and games to use Discord.
If this helps please also unban / unblock the the word Guilded as well lol cause even though they own it or partnered with it, you cant say that word either.
That’s ironic given that they allow us to link Discord servers at the bottom of our games’ descriptions, but wouldn’t that also “harm their Guilded acquisition” as well?
I would honestly support Roblox banning all Discord links and removing any functionality for Discord that may exist in Studio (throwing errors for webhook links if possible, etc.). There isn’t a good reason to keep system functionality around for a service you don’t have oversight of when your company owns a viable alternative, especially considering all the scandals plaguing Roblox over the past couple of years that have started on Discord servers. It might’ve been important to keep Discord around in 2018 when Guilded was brand new, but nowadays there’s no purpose Discord can fulfill that Guilded can’t.
So, since this PolicyService exemption exists, maybe for those that can see it, it should be exempt from their chat filter too?
That still depends on the community moderators to actually moderate their servers and enforce the guidelines, and there are some Discord and Guilded servers which are a great example of what happens when you don’t do that. Guilded doesn’t install moderators into your community for you; they’ll just shut down your server if it violates the guidelines due to a lack of moderation (or at least they should do).
…which will also occur on Guilded, and I wouldn’t be surprised if at least one scandal has occurred due to a Guilded server.
Discord has a much stronger userbase than Guilded, and up until December Guilded didn’t have a proper API which made it very unattractive to a lot of developers, myself included. Whilst they have improved on that and finally released an API, I feel it’s come way too late and there’s not much motivation for me to move onto it anymore. Discord has been around for a lot longer, is more mature of an application, and is slowly growing its featureset (although I don’t believe more is always better…). Guilded started out with a very strong ambition and then failed to deliver in time, and it resulted in a lot of people not joining it.
I wasn’t arguing in favor of moderators being installed in community servers; they don’t even provide that service for your games on the Roblox platform (stopping troublemakers breaking the rules in a game that, by itself, doesn’t, which would otherwise result in the game getting banned). The point is that if a scandal occurs on Guilded, Roblox can directly address it and push changes that ensure it doesn’t happen again, since they own Guilded and can therefore make such demands. They can’t do the same with Discord; they can only ever make polite suggestions and hope Discord follows through on them. You see this all the time in their rule enforcement; if something happens “off-platform”, they might not take action, even if it clearly breaks the rules, and that’s even if they know it happened at all.
There’s no reason why a switch can’t be made because of the current user number imbalance between Discord and Guilded. Sure, it might be a bit of work porting a community over from Discord to Guilded, but all the infrastructure currently exists to inform community members via Discord server announcements, game updates, social media posts, etc. You’ll definitely lose some players, but if you did all of the above and they still didn’t catch on, they were probably not that active in your group, to begin with. Most people here would agree that activity is more important than the member count for a community.
If Guilded gets more users, it’s naturally going to generate more interest in the platform, and that will lead to Guilded reaching parity with Discord (if it hasn’t already) faster and faster. Roblox regularly makes sweeping changes as I suggested for reasons like I mentioned in my first post (turning FilteringEnabled on for all games to protect against exploits, the recent advertisement changes, etc.). They may be unpopular at the time they’re enacted, but they are better for Roblox long-term. Roblox already seems to be steering in that direction.
I mean, they’re only working on an official anti-cheat now, after the platform has been up for 17 years. For them, when considering possible profit margins and potential safeguards against future scandals, there’s no such thing as “failing to deliver in time.”
