Response to code safety review discussion

They’d probably review the model in question, and punish the creator of said model, and not the owner of the game.

Also to answer your concern about model names. It’s probably due to the fact that model names can be shown if someone were to have a humanoid. Where as code is not viewed as easily on the server.

As I’ve said before to others. If you don’t want your code reviewed. Don’t do anything bad.

That certainly reduces the chance of you being moderated for code review. But you could still be moderated if you didn’t do anything bad. In fact, you can get moderated for doing something good. One developer got terminated for using a custom chat filter on top of the Roblox one despite Roblox allowing and encouraging developers to use an extra chat filter.

The developer who got banned for using a custom chat filter was likely banned because of swear words in code. The script was meant to filter out words like “free robux” and “F word” that didn’t get filtered by Roblox’s filter. But to make a filter like that, the filtered words would have to be in the script. The moderator who checked his code likely didn’t check what the script was used for and didn’t give his code a second look.

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That’s incorrect. Roblox does create many good updates, it’s just when they drop bad/controversial updates they’re much worse than the good updates are good. Part of it is communication, part of it is the actual update itself.

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That developer got unbanned. Months ago, i got a copy of MeepCity, not for stealing code purposes, just to learn how to script in an advanced way, well, MeepCity has a table with some inappropriated words that Roblox didn’t filter, guess what, I saved the game in Roblox, and I didn’t get a warning or ban. Maybe because it was privated… But I didn’t get any message for inappropriated stuff. Well, the point here is that the developer you mentioned is unbanned :slight_smile:

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So it means if I did this for example:


--[[
	@title: Roblox Chat Filter Support
]]--

-- Blacklisted words
local Blacklisted = {
	"let's say this is a Bad word",
	"Some other bad word",
	"Scam message",
	"Free robux scam"
}

-- Check if it contains one of those
local function doesContain(...)
	
end

local function getfilteredStringUsingRoblox(...)

Would still count as being “exposed” to Player? Of course string will be filtered by Roblox first, but then I would like to use my filter method, and one of blacklisted words would be a bad word and some scam messages that usually bots send, would I get moderated or no?

From the original post:

Furthermore, adding additional safety for the sake of your players in the form of an extra chat filter will not get you punished. We applaud you for wanting to go the extra mile to ensure your players have a safe experience! Just make sure the text you’re filtering is not visible to players (i.e. sent to the client) and all should be fine.

Looks like extra chat filters are allowed. As long as you don’t tell them what word/phrase caused them to be filtered you should be fine.

Yes, of course I won’t tell them what word, I can just replace the word with # or completely cancel message. Thanks for clearing that up for me!

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It’s illegal to possess a copied game on Roblox and you can be terminated for that alone regardless of the intention. Telling the whole devforum about it makes it more likely, too.

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I already know, that’s why the place is privated.

Also, the place became a starting place lol.

It’s entirely possible. In fact, its probable. One developer had already been banned for using an extra chat filter. And he was the only known case. There might have been more developers banned for similar reasons, only no one ever found out about their false bans.

It seems like the moderators aren’t giving code a second look before moderating the game/developer. Roblox code moderators don’t seem to check what the script does before banning the devloper and taking the game under review.

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I’m glad that they’re starting to inform users to modify their game instead of instant action against their account.

The action and instant termination that occured to me over the content I had in my game that tripped this exact flag; had the “special team” checked my code and “deemed it inappropriate for sure” sure was a surprize to me.

Even appealing after this “special teams” decision won’t get anywhere as the appeals team will just notice that it’s taken down for either ‘inappropriate content’ or ‘adult content’ and decline my only attempt to appeal, which is apparently, your first and only appeal.

The only way I actually finally managed to get my account back was ranting about it on this very exact topic for someone in the Roblox team to actually understand that it wasn’t intentional.

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I’ll step in about this also on how I got instantly terminated over strings that were put into an array.
There were over 300 submissions sent to me and they wanted me to make a tool to help users be able to organize the submissions in the way they seem from best to worst.
I didn’t ensure the submissions were safe at the time but the place I was editing them on was a friends only place. But if I would of been able to see that some words were inappropriate; would of already had me working on filtering the text. However…

Just minutes later after hitting publish and playing ingame, looking through only a small amount of the submissions; I’ve been slapped with the termination page and had to find out myself what actually got me terminated. I didn’t even get time to notice that the array had any inappropriate information for me to immediately work on. The game hadn’t even had other players join in as it was just 0 views and friends only.

Checking the game link and behold, it shows it got put ‘under review’.

I try to appeal, every request denied. Two months later, they finally made this devforum post. I was still logged into DevForum so I was able to reply and discuss the moderation action against my account. Mind you, if I logged out anytime in the two months, I wouldn’t of ever been able to log back into DevForum because you need your Roblox account to login.

Out of the blue after my multiple comments about how I feel the moderation action of ‘code reviewal’ is unfair, my account was secretly unterminated and I didn’t get notified.

I just simply heard a friend say “Hey, I can see your profile!”

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I’m still very confused about multiple things.
A. Are API keys going to be read?
B. Let’s say I write a curse word into my code as comment e.g. – curse word because I am angry at that time, will that be seen by moderation and then I can be punished for that?

For B I really hope that isn’t the case because I’m not wasting time going back and reviewing each and every single line of code to remove curse words I may or may not have added.

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A | Can’t give you an answer.
B | No.

If they need to read your code, then there’s no way for them to avoid wrong your API keys that are in your code, just don’t do anything wrong and they won’t read your code which means they won’t read your API keys

You can say no, but it really is instead up to Roblox’s “special team”.

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They said no in the annoucement.

I see a lot of complaints in this thread that “someone can read my private code” but that argument is flawed at it’s core. Roblox ensures your IP remains yours (with some rights given to Roblox reguarding platform advertisment and the like) but it has always been clear since I joined in 2008 that all content you upload is subject to review.

Your code is not private to Roblox staff when you upload it. You agreed it wasn’t by uploading it. If you’re worried about things like API keys you should support suggestion threads that include features for keeping API keys seperate from code to ensure Roblox can more easily moderate code without exposing the keys to human eyes. This is far from true protection though as ultimatly anything you upload to Roblox can be viewed by Roblox and you agreed to that.

Additionally asking for “what exactly” would trigger a review is unreasonable. If I published an exact security protocal bad actors could now simply avoid things listed in that proceedure. A key factor to security systems is their secrecy.

I’m all for better moderation systems, with a more human element whenever possible (this is actually really hard to do at large scale) because I think we’ve all seen cases of easily identifiable bad actors getting away with it while someone who did nothing wrong gets flagged by an automated system or a subjective decision in poor taste and then only gets it resolved because they know someone.

Ultimatly I’m happy to see communication on the general process Roblox is employing here, and hope to see continued progress in making a more fair moderation system.

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To the developers writing personal stuff in their code.
Keep in mind that exploiters can easily find this information, just keep that in mind.
If you don’t want Roblox moderators to read it, you probably don’t want exploiters to either.

EDIT: Well, not the scripts in ServerScrptService, ServerStorage etc. But you get the point.

And Roblox’s mod team has gone against many of the things that were said to be okay in the announcements so…

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