Developers should not have to implement a middle man in proprietary services just to keep them (semi) proprietary. Will people be inclined to share their programs if they know that it will just be copied and redistributed?
Removal of the private modules and their concept entirely might limit the quality of code avaliable to the community; people don’t like sharing everything, at least when it can be stolen or be manipulated into doing something it wasn’t designed for.
As we already know as well, many people will no longer be able to provide their services (whether they were paid for or not) securely and with their original design intention.
I think the petition that your group is holding at the moment actually proves why this feature should be removed and have better restrictions in the long run. I noticed this on your website at the bottom.
Effectively, you are injecting new code into all of these games that you do not own, spurring players to do something not related to that game. This is somewhat harmless, but now think about what someone could do if they asked these 18,000 people to do something different than signing a petition. (i.e. “please sign in with your Roblox credentials to keep using this service”).
Did you duly inform and get permission from all of the people that use your system to display this popup about the petition in-game? If not, you just showed this change needs to happen.
EDIT: I went in-game to verify it does give a popup about the petition
The centres that are powered by us are just centres, people download them from our website and are told specifically that we automatically update their centre for them. One of our selling points is that we do all of the hard work, and that you don’t need to touch any code.
You can’t just use our module without knowing what it is, you don’t insert it from free models. People download a personalised pre-made game that is dedicated to loading their centre. We’ve actually spoke with some admins previously to ensure that we don’t allow for anyone to collect PII on our platform.
As for our petition, we’re showing it in centres as everyone who uses them will be affected by this change.
Edit: you made the point that we could ask for passwords. Removing private modules doesn’t change this, if a module was open source the developer could still make a update after there are thousands of users to ask for passwords.
Absolutely, but removing this feature would make that more difficult, not less difficult, so it needs to happen. If it’s open source it can be easily audited (considering you can also pull previous versions of each asset) and any issues like that can be reported.
And to be frank, if it were up to me, we’d kill this “require-by-id-if-you-don’t-own-it” thing entirely.
It’s infinitely times easier to review the code and bring it up to Roblox moderation/staff if something seems fishy.
But if it were up to me, I’d happily file a feature request for removing the “require by assetid if you don’t own it” feature too. It has some of the same security issues.
I don’t believe most of those users know enough about this topic for their signature on a petition to matter. The vast majority of Roblox players don’t keep up to date with the developer forums and your basic information doesn’t provide the information and context necessary to make an informed decision on this.
There will be some that do know but how many thousands of people don’t? Doing this is actually an excellent example of why private modules should not be a thing because with it you’ve demonstrated:
Private modules can be used to inject code arbitrarily into many games
Private modules give high-profile developers extremely high influence and power compared to other players as a popular service or model (say, Terabyte) could insert whatever information they wanted into a game.
The sensationalizing and reactionary phrasing of the petition doesn’t help your case, and the way this was carried out actually weakens it. It’s misusing influence and information to scare players into thinking something is more important than it is, honestly, and it’s disappointing to see you do this.
Next time Roblox tries to destroy the hard work of many developers, I’ll try not to raise awareness or tell anyone.
The petition has now been signed by almost 23,000 people and has lead to many reading up on exactly what’s going on into more detail.
I disagree with your demonising of an organisation that is trying to raise awareness about a devasting change. The petition is not designed to generate fear, it simply states facts.
I honestly don’t know how to respond to that beyond highlighting a part of the first sentence: “Next time Roblox tries to destroy the hard work of many developers, I’ll try not to raise awareness or tell anyone.”
That is a complete misrepresentation of what’s happening here and it makes it more clear that you are pushing an agenda and a biased narrative. You say you’re not trying to generate fear, but you’re doing exactly that; you’re misrepresenting what’s going on so as to radicalize users to action.
Bruh what are you rambling on about, you are 1 person trying to uphold your way of making money out of thousands of people getting scammed by this fault in module scripts. At this point it sounds like rambling and ignorance as well as greed on your part. Stop spamming this thread with your petition count when it’s already been shown you just inject it into every place your code is in.
I don’t see any sense in your argument when there is a serious security issue going on. While this issue was overlooked by staff when released, the terms say that they can change anything at anytime, so there is no point in argueing against a major security flaw.
I’m all for fixing the issue with a solution such as sandboxing. But they’re not doing that right away, they’re being lazy and removing an entire feature.
I’ve already discussed why we need private modules in this thread.
It takes time to release things, it’s a better solution on their part to remove private modules atm and fix the fault than waiting for a new feature to release. There is no argument I can see to keep them around.
It’s not being lazy, it’s removing a feature with very few genuine use cases (yours and selling code seem to be the only legitimate ones) to fix an active and serious security flaw.
So 23,000 people signed the petition…but not all read up on exactly what’s going on? Your “petition” was just showing a GUI and giving a biased explanation of what’s going on, with a button to easily click. Not the best way to get well informed signatures, and not something Roblox should bother looking at.
Your “brief summary” was biased and only showed your point of view in a sentence or so. Hardly the best way to get well informed signatures.
I’m not entirely sure how legitimate your services are either, considering with a few clicks I can show advertisements in my game in exchange for Robux. Unless I’m mistaking what “Minimum Cashout” means?
