Response to code safety review discussion

I think the developer community deserves more detail as to how this “specially trained” team is trained, so that we (the developers) know how it’s all going to go down. As long as you keep that to the team and the administrators only, this situation of us being paranoid will only get worse. I hate this update, but if you were to give us more information and answer more of our questions, then perhaps I could understand this just a little more. We have API keys and ideas we want to protect. By making a team to review our code, you can’t guarantee the safety of our code. I will not continue to develop on ROBLOX if this “team” cannot be proven to be one that will abide by the rules. You’ve had some bad updates, but this one hits home to me. I’m done.

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Now yet again, today was a horrible day. My DevForum was logged out, no idea if it was automated or by force. I then even lost my ‘Member’ role on the Discord DevForum group so I couldn’t even step my foot onto Roblox anywhere with other developers and then sometime later today, my account gets unterminated again and I don’t have a message in my email, in my DevForum inbox, or even on my Roblox account about what’s happening about this moderation history… Did this affect my chances of DevEx because of these multiple moderation actions on my account? Am I on a secret ban list and got banned in a wave? What is going on. I don’t even have motivation to work on my Roblox account because I fear it’s going to be the exact same situation. Account terminated out of the blue, no warning, now even worried about my DevForum being logged out and pushed around on the DevForum Discord group.

Where can I get an actual update about the status of my account?

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Not to be rude but what does this have to do with the topic?

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My account was terminated and unterminated twice over code reviewal?

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Oh I see my mistake it’s weird seeing it without context.

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I hope this doesn’t get huge groups banned because of old code having some stupid comments that include text that breaks the Discord Terms of Service, imagine your huge group getting banned because of a old script laying around in your game that has a inappropriate line/comment.

Also, I hope that the privacy of users are kept safe and that this is fully automated.

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Fully automated is a bad idea, since there is currently no way for a bot to tell context accurately.

False bans would be left, right and centre.

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I definitely see this as an update that partially regresses a stable moderation system. What I’ve seen and still see is a very untamed, prototype build that Roblox is creating as they learn about what it really takes to moderate a myriad of user accounts. The truth is - A concrete prediction of when we’d ever get a somewhat secure system is when Roblox would begin to stray away from consistent “updating” (As some chats moderated are far from profane or are not even remotely inappropriate) of what is “prohibited” concept by concept - They need to assess deeper in sized bunches what has been recently misunderstood by their moderation team and what content that Developers have been pinging do not represent bad/unwelcome intentions.

As somebody who has nearly been banned by similar misunderstandings, All I must say is - Like how a Developer should contrive his/her programming structure/style: ***Roblox needs to really take time to scheme more efficient monitoring of false and legitimate reasons users would be banned. Yes, sure it exists, but without a efficient, fair design that could be made by hearing out those who were screwed over or even by hiring some special “Community Agent/Retriever” team (A team/agent who would take actual time to review meanings behind misunderstandings of users and maybe put bans on pend or revoke them mid-process), There will be unrest of not only your Developers, but some pretty extreme caveats in your trust as a corporation.

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Edit: Sorry about the reply, accidently hit that again, ugh.

Finally received a message from another Roblox Staff that has let me know the conditions of my account.

Yes, the content in the array of 300+ submissions from off-site players did contain some inappropriate words, but this was going to be a game for the exact people that need to see the 300+ submissions so I didn’t think of inappropriate content having my account flagged at all or even outright terminated in seconds of developing by automation. What exactly does “flag content that’s dangerous or harmful to our community” really mean? All it is was text on a surface gui, not actual dangerous or harmful content to the Roblox community.

No, your account was supposedly unterminated inbetween as a result of a glitch/bug and your termination actually hadn’t been revoked until as of yesterday. That part confuses me but I suppose that’s what this message I’ve received said even though my both termination reasons were different.

Yes, Roblox will just outright terminate your account if you have excessive or just inappropriate words in your scripts. Be it either people’s ‘Ten Words of Wisdom’ sentences going political, be about intimacy, or even just nonsense words of gibberish which all were in the 300+ localscript array, could get you terminated in minutes to seconds. No ‘code reviewal team’ here.

All this just proves is that Roblox knows that their system is automated, their appeals system just rides with this automated system, and that any account appeals for small developers are going to be done through community sage members complaining that your account termination was unfair.

Even if you were in the middle of developing a game and was 100% willing to filter the content in your friends only game once you found out and awhile that you were developing on, it seems that Roblox will not care and just go with the latest publish you uploaded to your profile being a complete build every time and treat every game the same to their strictest standard of kid friendly.

You won’t get a warning or action to fix the issue and even if they say you’ll be notified, you won’t because I hadn’t. I’ve been fighting this issue since the start of 2020, having to hope that Roblox Staff that are still working during this pandemic can help me awhile their automated system does the heavy lifting of penalizing the livelihood of our developer accounts that been on Roblox for more than multiple years.

And finally, yes… I do take the blame that I should’ve sanitize all input of anything I put into my code. But treating everyone like a conveyor belt worker that could get “fired” from their spot on a platform because they posted a swear and that your ‘roblox code reviewal team’ can view your flagged code without notice is enough to shaken your developers on your platform.

So yeah, if you’re a developer that wants to avoid termination, follow my 100% fool proof guide.

  1. Make an alt and use that strictly for game development, Roblox doesn’t care and Roblox terminates in minutes automatically. Once your game been up on your alt account for more than a week, you’ll be safe to say that it’ll be ok to put it on your main account without retaliation of the automated systems in place. Maybe if you want to be extra safe, just have a place teleporter on your main place to teleport to all your alt places. Although you won’t get all the place visits you’ll usually get, it’ll work to avoid a termination till the issues are pressed out of their automation.

  2. Don’t bother doing Robux transactions over 2k+ in Robux. Stick with actual off-site revenue to pay your developers for now. It’s already apparent that Roblox’s second secret automation system regarding detecting of off-site trading is falsely banning developers that I believe would of been able to get unterminated based on how much work I’ve seen them put on the Roblox platform also. Use services like PP, venmo, etc.

  3. Be weary of everything you type on the Roblox platform, even if you’re stressed out from the situation at hand, being the pandemic, being the uncertainty of your account, being the wild automation history that Roblox is now gladly sprinting for. Anything you type needs to be ‘kids friendly’. Automation doesn’t have human feelings.

So yeah, It’ll be awhile before I’ll even feel comfortable even developing on my own account since I don’t want to get randomly slammed with a termination again. I’ll just develop on my alt account and have my main account be a nice statue that I’m still on Roblox.
I’ve been on Roblox clear way back to the point of ‘Build a raft to the winners zone’ and staying up the entire night to the next school day playing that game that Roblox provided to me and the developer to upload and play for free. Roblox is an amazing platform, but I do hope they try to be more lenient on accounts that been on Roblox for more than two years.

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This is so good Im so happy to be part of this team its amazing I started today and this looks kinda lit I love developing with others its fun we can even do feedback and all of that

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I really hate the idea of people searching through my or others scripts just because they MIGHT be inappropriate. If this happens, we need FULL closure. We need to see which scripts are being viewed, and if moderation action is taken we need to know what place, what script, what line(s), etc. Public outrage WILL ensue if developers are given random bans because something was inappropriate, and if people are searching scripts.

I propose a warrant system. The code-searching team should provide a higher-up actual mod with screenshots of in-game obscenities and once given permission by a higher-up mod, provide the player with those screenshots and say “these screenshots show obscenities. We are going into your game to investigate.” Players should also receive some sort of compensation for false searches/bans, whether that is free Robux, or Premium, or something else (hat, accessory, etc.)

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This new post obviously didn’t help. According to my poll (32 voters), the results were…

Before New Post: 93.8% Disliked the Update
After New Post: 81.8% Disliked the Update

Not much changed.

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32 developers is quite a small amount of votes to form a final answer in my opinion. The amount of people who have seen the 2 topics about this is much, much higher than 32.

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Personally, I am afraid to make a secondary filtering system on top of Roblox’s. Roblox’s filtering system doesn’t catch some bypasses and phrases related to scamming, etc. I was going to make secondary filter, but now I don’t know if I can. It was stated, they weren’t looking for inappropriate words, but if I have a table of things to moderate, I feel like my account would be terminated, when all I am trying to do is protect the players more.
It would be great if I could have assurance my account won’t be terminated if I make a secondary filtering system.

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At this time, it’s either ignore it or obfusticate it. They try to say that chat filter modifications to hashtag more words are ‘ok’ but yet people here still hadn’t been responded to.

Roblox still has failed to provide an option to appeal if your code is flagged and then deemed ‘dangerous to the Roblox community’ and instead will terminate you w/o warning. It’s a very rough bumpy road that you have to ride against to be able to unterminate your own account.

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A feature like this would likely get abused, people would write purposely detected scripts so the team review and then give them compensation. Even if it was compensation for a false ban only it would be harder, but likely would still be abused.

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I believe there is a case to be made for moderating code, however this should only apply to code that is publicly available (e.g. public models, modules, etc.). I believe moderating closed source code would only create more problems than it would solve. I just hope, if implemented at all, that this solution is actually solving a real problem rather than potentially disrupting development on the platform by posing a security risk to developers that do need to have private api keys and more highly sensitive data stored on their private scripts.

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Roblox moderation is probably the worst I have ever seen on any platform, This is why I still don’t trust them moderating code, Even now they have moderated a lot of the fun meme games.

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Then limit the system to big games and trusted developers that have too much to lose (like badmino, Dreamworks, stylis studios ect). That way the only people who even have the ability to abuse it will loose more from getting their accounts terminated and not getting revenue than exploiting it.

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Same with you. I also thought we wouldn’t have a response.

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