Hi all,
Roblox has recently enforced moderation actions towards experiences that submit false content maturity., specifically, Social Hangouts. Unfortunately, it has hit experiences that I work for or I have made on my own.
I know and see the idea in Roblox wanting to ensure safety for these experiences as they’re often targets for bad actors exploiting children, and I know that TheOfficialTeddy has had experiences alike that were left unmoderated and likely steered Roblox for this change - but I do want to acknowledge that I and the teams currently affected do our best to ensure safety for our players.
I serve hundreds of ingame suspensions daily through automation using third party databases, specific chat string detection and even client mods that may modify the local players appearance to be inappropriate and have had 150+ successful suspensions for inappropriate conduct within our experience, TINEL.
We also log those moderation instances for our trained staff team to see and approve whenever necessary. Our logs are as defined here, happen daily and are vastly accurate to the users moderation standing.
Additionally, we serve in-game reports for players to file reports that are normally dealt with faster than using the standard Roblox reporting feature. Our in-game reports are then sent to third party services for a trained staff team to deal with.
We do our best to ensure safety more than Roblox’s own report feature would, especially for bad actors attempting to get in contact with underage users, therefore I see these suspensions unfit and unnecessary for games who actually prioritize safety first.
Games such as TINEL, Emote Blox, R6 Dances & more make their efforts to deal with hundreds of reports daily and submit relevant moderation actions in the hundreds daily. We make more of an effort than Roblox ever would.
I request to reconsider this change and instead to work with us, rather enforcing unnecessary limitations that have almost no impact at all. Most of the times, you’ll find underage users posing themselves as 13+ which is found out through the means of VC. This is not fixing the issue, it’s a poor attempt at suppressing it.
Please have a thought in considering working with the relevant games for safety, especially the ones who actually care. There’s games in the same genre I dabble in that do way worse, perform way better and have much more disturbing events that have occurred than in my or my partners experiences. And I see that as unfair.
I’m also very aware that there are experiences in the social hangout genre that are currently unaffected by this through the escalation of developer relations, and I find that insanely unfair and a misjudgement given the experiences related to this are inferior, less moderated and had instances of NSFW content displayed in their experiences.