Roblox Moderation Concern

Hi everyone! So I and my friend are working on a sort of system that allows you to preview websites. Like, actual websites, and it would load the HTML content and you would be able to see and even interact with the site in-game, and images would be converted into ASCII to be visible.

However, not we are not quite sure if that is going to be okay in terms of Roblox’s Terms of Service. We thought of making only a few selected websites accessible (such as roblox.com, lua.org, or Wikipedia), but we are still unsure if that would be okay.

So yeah, if anyone knows any better, please let me know!

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Tricky one, I remember in the past reading that someone showing a livestream in ROBLOX from their PC or even just a youtube one got their account terminated. You’d be doing the same thing but with text.

Technically it’ll be “off-site links”. The content would be unfiltered and could bypass the moderation. Due to that, I’d say it’s probably best not to do it.

The “Community Rules” state that “Using partial links, filter-breaking, using permitted website links to indirectly link to non-permitted sites, content, or services, describing or otherwise encouraging users to go to unpermitted offsite links, content, or services is also not allowed.” - basically saying that you’d be allowing people to see off-site links, which is therefore against their rules. You can read more here: https://en.help.roblox.com/hc/en-us/articles/203313410-Roblox-Community-Rules.

TLDR; I’d say don’t do it to be safe, it’s a grey area but the rules say you shouldn’t really do it, and something similar in the past did end up with a termination.

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If you just let them access roblox that would be fine but as soon as it is anywhere else the game will at least be taken down

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Thanks for the reply!

First up, as for the filtering part: The loaded content does get filtered. It will for sure damage the User Experience, but we felt there was no other choice.

As for offsite links, while the Roblox Community Rules do state that loading offsite links is not allowed, there is an exception such as YouTube, Facebook, Discord, Twitter, Twitch and according to Roblox:

such other links that Roblox may subsequently permit)

I’m more wondering if the sites lua and wikipedia would also be allowed.

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The safest bet would be to not risk it. As Supertestsubject said:

People have tried similar things with video before - they filtered it themselves but it still got taken down.

It’s a good idea, and the ROBLOX site itself could be fine with it, but as soon as you go to external sites, I really don’t think it’ll work out well. You could try and ask ROBLOX I guess, but they’ll just say the same thing as it’s in their TOS.

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As for Wikipedia, you may need to be way more cautions as there are some “inappropriate” topics on there.

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This game wouldn’t be allowed. Viewing websites through the game is a huge moderation risk.

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