If you’re reading this and have been on Roblox voice chat in the last few months, chances are you know exactly what I’m talking about. Many players have faced warnings, suspensions, and temporary bans for unfair and illegitimate reasons. The moderation system on Roblox is flawed. People, including myself, cannot talk in a voice chat game without fear of getting banned. Although implementing features like voice chat helps communities and experiences on the platform, the moderation actively works against Roblox’s goals for voice chat.
People avoid voice chat games due to fear of unjust moderation. I recently had my VC privileges suspended in the game “On Tap,” a 17+ game, without a specific reason stated. If Roblox aims to support 17+ communities, it must reconsider moderation for this age group or VC as a whole. The practice of banning players without speaking in a game, based solely on reports, is unfair and for a corporation of Roblox’s size…outright unacceptable. I’ve seen Dev Forum posts by the owner of the game “On Tap” talking about players getting VC banned, when they never spoke. Under no circumstance should a system that flawed and unfair ever be enforced on millions of players if those reports are to be believed.
I am incredibly disappointed in the state of Roblox voice chat moderation, and many others are too. I want to spark a dialogue about this issue, as most affected people can’t express their frustrations on the dev forum due to length restrictions. If you’ve had similar problems or anything new to add, please let me know. The more this issue is talked about, the better chance of it being addressed. I dont want to lead a hate campain towards Roblox, my only goal is to promote a healthy conversation.
Some answers I would love to hear would be:
1.) How is Roblox moderation handled presently?
2.) How does Roblox intend to improve voice chat in the future?
3.) Will moderation for 17+ experiences be the same as younger age groups?
Copy and paste thread. The same problems have been raised several times. I assume with Roblox’s recent RDC announcement about them training AI moderation for VC in the coming months to automatically detect conversation in real time, the false bans by auto mod without proper reviews will decrease.
Sadly Roblox has a moderation policy of “shoot first and don’t ask questions”. I’ve even been a victim of this myself and was removed from platform for several weeks a couple months ago (when all I do is try to execute on my job and produce random 3d assets).
Voice chat, text chat, content moderation… this policy of aggressive punishment is across the board. And applies to everyone (even professionals trying to generate income for themselves / the platform).
Seriously, it’s so annoying just talking to people and get banned for doing that.
One time we were making fun of the dynamic heads for how odd it could be and I got banned for that, I appealed with no avail saying it was justified. I was having another friendly chat with someone and I kept getting warnings even though I was just having a friendly chat.
I remember when voice chat was exclusive to ID verified users, and you had to be over 18, voice chat was unmoderated, and you didn’t have to worry about privacy concerns having your voice recorded.
I agree, the current situation is unacceptable now, as I can’t talk with other adults anymore without risk of being banned.
Adding more to this, most games that use voice chat don’t have moderation in the first place like most (Valve) Source games (Counter-Strike, Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead 2, etc). Call of Duty used to not have moderation until way later when they decide to add actual moderation which was (obviously) really controversial.
Proximity Voice Chat is hilarious. Screaming while falling is hilarious and there shouldn’t be any moderation for that when it’s just a couple of friends in a private server or something since a inside joke could potentially get misinterpreted as a bad thing.
As you’ve seen from my examples those are usually 17+ games and an honest hot (but probably bad) take, voice chat moderation should be completely off limits during 17+ games.
Also, just a weird thing, but I’m afraid of what I say in the first place. What if the AI misinterprets me saying a very bad thing? And also, when they ban you, it’s completely vague. All it says is, “Voice chat conversation on XX/XX/XXXX at 12:00 AM in [EXPERIENCE]”. Like what did I even say?
Roblox used to actually show the images to you when your account was punished (seek, Fleskhjerta’s ban which is I’m pretty sure 10+ years ago), but now it’s just not there, what if I don’t know what I did?
It’s been months and now that voice chat is out of beta this is still a huge problem. I was in a server and someone literally admitted to going through the server list and reporting everyone. I had my microphone on for a couple of seconds and said literally nothing and my voice chat was suspended for 24 hours.
It seems Roblox’s moderation bots will automatically suspend anyone who gets reported for voice chat regardless of what they said (or if they even said anything for that matter.) This is an absolutely awful system. I mean, at least text chat uses trigger words for moderation. People are literally abusing this problem yet the feature was taken out of beta testing with this massive flaw. Not everyone on Roblox is honest (far from it) and whoever implemented this clearly does not understand that.
Even absolutely zero voice chat moderation would be far better than this and would cause less problems.
If you’re gonna have this type of easily exploitable system at the very least shorten the suspensions to more reasonable times such as 15 minutes to an hour.
I have had my voice chat temporarily suspended. The filter picked up ‘Inappropriate’ words that it flagged. I had not said anything hardly, and it randomly popped up. When trying to explain this to the moderation team to get this off my record, as it was a false positive.
I was not reporting anyone, nor was there a need to.
This is seriously the most petty I’ve seen someone do before as well, there is just so many major, and I mean highly major problems with Roblox that I don’t understand why I put my time working here.
