Response to code safety review discussion

I’m only pushing out Roblox to offer a way to appeal issues related to code review issues in a different way than pushing everyone into a DMV like line of an appeals system.

My account was directly terminated over the exact context of this topic so I only feel like talking about it here fits? Explaining how hard that it was for me to work my way through trying to inform Roblox that this has ought to be a mistake for the level of punishment that I was given on my code and to help me undo it and fix it shouldn’t be this hard.

Edit: I shouldn’t have to see YouTube videos of other people saying that putting in a message saying that ‘I’m the parent of this Roblox account, my email is x, can I get help about this issue’ gets more attention than a development outcry for an appeal that gets stamped with ‘decision already made’ or ‘I’m unable to discuss this matter any further’

This has been discussed before on this thread, please search before posting.

But that’s just never going to happen.

It’s the moderation team that moderates your chat, that moderates your images, that moderates your game and moderates your scripts.

There is no way to create a separate system that wouldn’t have the same flaws; and even if they did, it would create a redundancy. The TRUE solution is to make the current system better. But that’s a different topic.

True, but I’ve seen people complaining that they have swear words in their comments. That is the stuff I’m talking about.

I totally agree with moderating it if it’s in a string like a print(“bad words here”) or a textLabel.Text = “bad words here”, but other then that, I don’t think there should be repercussion.

I use to work with a dev who when the code didn’t work, he would put a swear word in there, that was his visual reminder the next day of what to fix.

Even if the words are appearing in the LocalPlayer logs like print, I believe it should be moderated. Developers do tend to get the easy pass from this sorta stuff because there is not this idea of a “filter” for text inputted by developers.

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I agree with this, however if it’s in a string with print(“bad words here”), why would Roblox even care about this. Roblox isn’t moderating this according to them and some people almost never get moderated until now for the usage of bad words (I think).

It’s not worth it to get your code moderated after putting in bad words in your code that is not visible to the public.

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Depends if it is local.

Users can see things being printed out if it is local with F9.

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Because it’s technically still against ToS. Even if it’s in comments, even if the client doesn’t see it. It’s still breaking the rules. It’s like saying crimes should be legal if not seen. Which would be wrong. Other than creating a filter, there is honestly no actual reason to have swear words in your scripts.

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Roblox doesn’t actively search for swear words in comments and prints; but they will moderate if they find it.

Just don’t put swear words in your code; it’s that simple. If your comments are just swear words, you need to get a better coding style.

Lots of devs swear in their comments in frustration or just as part of their normal vocabulary. While I’ve toned down on my usage of swears within my code, some of my friends still swear in their code. Hell, as I mentioned (jokingly) in another reply, a Roblox gear had a swear printed to the dev console (the Power Glove, it’s still in lots of free models that were published when the gear came out before it got removed, line 135 of the server script “GloveScript”)

While Roblox did remove it, what makes their gear developers exempt from not being able to swear in code? While yes, it is an old gear, why shouldn’t we be swearing in our code but the gear developers can swear in their code? In old leaked versions of PF, the comments have swears too.

Progarmmers will sometimes swear in their comments when they’re frustrated with their code. Look at Valve. Although their games are entirely closed source and not made with children in mind, we wouldn’t have known that they swore in their code without the source code leak. It’s the same thing here. If it’s a team create then yeah, I would understand, but in circumstances where you are the ONLY person who would see your code, then why does it matter? Sure, terms of service, you can bring that up again, but why other reasons are there other than that? Why should that be grounds for a ban? A warning, maybe, or the code moderators removing the swears and replacing them with other words, but why a ban and complete game deletion? (If swears really do get you moderated, which I doubt)

On a sidenote why are swears even held to such a standard

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Well, then programmers should be more mature and follow Roblox’s Terms of Service. I also don’t see the relevance of the GloveScript? Roblox removed the swears from it, in line with the new policy.

If your argument is one that just dismisses “oh yeah I’m breaking the rules, why does it matter?” then it is no argument at all.

Swears are disallowed because it’s bad for children to see swears - it’s rude for them to be said, and if children learnt swears from this platform it’d be a hell of bad press for the company. Likewise, swears are often used as insults, which isn’t cool.

Roblox have said that they don’t want you swearing, because they aren’t going to be drawing those constantly changing lines in the sand as to what is “public code” or not. It’s really not hard - and likewise, if you read their post, they’re only going after people using slurs and racist/homophobic terms, or hosting PII (like addresses or real names, which is a legal issue for them)

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Thank you good sir. I could not have said it better myself.

Does this include exploiters, or not?

This only covers code published to the game; not code injected by an exploit.

I think he means does it include code that exploiters can see.

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Exploiters can’t see comments in compiled code.

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Why would exploiters even matter lol.

If they use exploits like synapse they certainly can steal and view client code.

They can see the compiled bytecode. This means they can’t see:

  • Comments
  • Raw variable names (note that functions are variables too)
  • and a few other things which aren’t needed in the compiled code (iirc unused variables are also removed from the compiled source)

The stolen source would be basically useless.

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It’s not entirely useless - the structure is still there. It’s just significantly more difficult to understand.

Decompilers like Ghidra and Hex-Rays also usually can’t get the original variable names.

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