I’m sure you’ve been in a situation where a group name you wanted is taken, but the group that has said name has no members and is set to request pending. This can be really annoying and can cause many groups to include special characters including Unicode characters such as the space character.
What should be done?
I think there needs to be a way to remove groups that have no members, especially if they’re set to request pending. Not only will this mean that more people can re-use those names, but it means that people don’t have to make names that are filled with horrible looking Unicode characters just to pursue the name that they wish to take. Not to mention ROBLOX servers would also be able to benefit from this as they’re not having to store all this unused data.
How can we prevent this after these groups have been deleted?
I think there are many ways that we can prevent this from happening & some of these examples are listed below:
Do not allow the last member of a group to leave unless the join permission is set to Public
Automatically remove said group after the last member has left
Create a Remove group button that allows a user to delete a group (as long as the user is the only user in the group) and then have ROBLOX refund said user x% of the group’s value
Personally, I’d like to see groups on ROBLOX that are active and do not have silly names just because someone decided to create a group with that name beforehand and not actually use it.
Please reply with your feedback on this situation. Is there anything you would change? Do you support this idea?
Something to keep in mind is that groups still have things like group funds / places / etc when they’re abandoned, so it wouldn’t be a great idea to open up empty groups just because they’re empty. In fact, at one point people were going through empty groups and claiming them en masse just for the funds.
Another issue is if someone compromises a group owner’s account, gets it down to 0 members, and then the group is automatically deleted.
In light of this, if we were to do something like this, it would probably be a good idea to:
Act on groups that have been with 0 members after x time, instead of instantly
Change the group’s name to something random (e.g. 12014082305892346) like ROBLOX does for content deletions to free up the name but not the funds/assets
When a user creates a place & then said user’s account is deleted, the place owner doesn’t change. I don’t think any different should happen with group places.
I see what you’re saying about groups funds also. Maybe ROBLOX could payout all the funds to the last member to leave the group if the funds are not already taken.
Those two points you’ve made are also very interesting and something to consider.
When a current leader hands off a group to their successor, both of them are going to want the new owner to have the existing places. Group places persisting through ownership changes is correct behavior – the only case it’s undesirable is the edge case of claiming a dead group. Unassigning the group’s name produces desirable behavior across the board, while changing ownership behavior causes a problem for the majority of ownership changes.
If they want the funds, they can take them. I’m not sure why you’re so persistent on getting the actual group instead of just the name, because your listed use case is group names.
Most of the time if I leave a group I own it was a development team. These either need to be locked forever or deleted with no chance of anyone joining.
I can’t have people getting into the games I had in it’s places.
Making use of an old group that has the user’s desired name would save ROBLOX data space, maybe just a little, but it all adds up. Especially if you were to not remove the group but change it’s name to a string of some description.
As for the group places. I was talking specifically about the labelled owner noted on said game’s page. I should have been more specific.
Data space is a non-issue – you don’t need to worry about it. ROBLOX has enormous amounts of groups, user accounts, assets, etc created every day, and the amount of space saved by reusing a group instead of creating a new one is negligible. If that’s your only reason for reusing a group, there’s no benefit to it.
The successor would still need access to that game, and the labeled owner for group games is the group name – not a username.
If the group was deleted using ‘ROBLOX’s string method’, there would be no need to access the game. Seeing as the group would only be deleted if the group was locked with no one inside it anyway.
I’m not sure how you think the content deletion renaming works, but let me clarify the behavior if this were used to free up group names:
The original group would be renamed to something random such as ‘12412523523463’
The original group would retain its ID, assets, and funds
The newly created group using the old name would be an entirely new group (new ID, no assets, no funds)
The newly created group would not have access to anything the original group did
I originally thought you were still suggesting reusing the actual group, but if you’re not, there would not be anything shared by the old group and the new group except the name.
There’s no way to remove games from a group btw. Even if you publish a blank place over them, subsequent owners could access your games through version history.
This is a highly debatable topic, along with recycling usernames that haven’t been used in 10+ years. It’s just complicated to come up with a delicate way to approach these issues.
I know you where probably meaning that in a sarcastic way, but just to clarify this is not a good idea. The immediate problem with this is groups copying other groups and leaching off of other group’s fame that someone probably put a lot of hard work into. It will also be confusing because there will probably end up being a ton of copy spammed groups and it could end up looking like the current catalog.
I disagree. People already manage to copy group names almost exactly, if not exactly. If you search any group name you’re sure to find tons of other groups that you couldn’t tell the difference apart.
I was searching for a group earlier, I put its exact name in the search, and it was 4th in the results.
We really have nothing to lose by allowing groups with the same name, other than the “allies/enemies” system needing a new method of identifying groups.
While when I first saw your post my immediate thoughts were what Endorsed said,
You’re right. People copy group names by using a million brackets or some invisible icons. I would much prefer seeing either a legitimate copy, or having group names only be able to use letters, than a giant garbled mess that just screws up my screen.
I think that having groups with the same name pretty much ruins uniqueness. You can already pretty much copy other group names using the Unicode blank space character - It would be like letting someone else copy your username.
I’d really like if this was to be implemented as many group game names that I really want have been locked and this would be such an easy change that they could make which would improve a lot of things.