Developers shouldn’t have to be scared to upload content in fear of risking their account being banned and losing all of their hard work on this site, and everything they own from assets to groups and catalog items which they most often spend real money to obtain.
When content creators are being so very careful with the content they are uploading and things still get moderated and bans still being given mistake or not, then how can content creators trust this site at all? I’ve already seen a few developers leave Roblox over similar issues that people are talking about in this thread, which shouldn’t even be issues in the first place.
Hopefully the moderation system is improved for the better for both devs and players, because this is a place for fun not fear.
And this is an unfortunate truth. If you don’t have a voice, or connections, or a platform, and you’re falsely moderated (which must have happened to many, many people that we don’t know about), there is not a lot you can do. You can appeal, but if your ban is within 1-3 days, there is no point, because by the time you receive a reply, your ban would’ve already expired, and you will ultimately feel cut short. For bans longer than that, the best and only thing you could do is appeal; and for aspiring developers, this is surely discouraging.
Time after time, Roblox has tried to institute automatic bans that have never gone right, and you’d think that after all this criticism, from as long as Roblox has been around, the moderation system would be better than it is now. I think that it is particularly interesting how the ability to view your Moderation History is no longer available, which in times where bans and warnings, particularly false ones, are given more frequently, could be to hide how many times they’ve messed up.
Agreed. This isn’t the first time I’ve complained about the moderation system. Once got a 3 day ban for a really old forum post quite some time back. Apparently the moderation team couldn’t tell when a forum post was made. I’m hoping that was fixed since then (although maybe a moot point, since forums are gone). I also complained about not knowing what you were banned for a while back as well.
Your list is really good, especially having greater communication and transparency. At the very least, it would give us reason to trust Roblox, and know that we aren’t just being responded to by a bot. Honestly, the emails from the appeals team seems so automated and impersonal at times, I almost wouldn’t even want to bother.
If it’s not done already, give the moderation team more info about assets that are easily accessible (especially time of something). Basically a set of tools to help determine if something is bad or not, especially things that’d help speed along moderation.
The ability for end users to have a way to view evidence, even if it was deemed adult content or whatever.
Create a program were trusted users will have their reports ‘prioritized’, while users who tend to send false reports (especially reports sent en masse) may lose their ability to report others. It would likely reduce the rate that false reports are sent, while trusted members bring more blatant problems straight to the moderators.
Create a volunteer team similar to the old forum moderation team, possibly signing a contract and proving they’re 18+ (or whatever legalities are required). Give them the ability to communicate with the moderation team, and various other powers. Help ease the workload basically.
4-5 probably have their own problems, but 1-3 would be really nice to have.
Roblox, you guys need to proactively restore any and all accounts that were incorrectly terminated by this audio refund glitch. You can’t just tell people “oops, sorry we accidentally deleted your account for no reason, but if you email appeals they might help you out.” The appeals system is clearly useless here. They are refusing to unban completely innocent users. They do not understand this situation at all.
And there’s undoubtedly a ton of other users who were incorrectly rejected by appeals and are not a part of the developer forum, so they now have no way to get their accounts back themselves. This is the worst possible way this situation could have been handled.
I agree 100% with this. Even though accounts were possibly seen exploiting this on purpose, they are only doing it because THEY HAD the ability to do so. If they didn’t had the ability to do so, this situation wouldn’t have reached to this point. This entire audio incident sets back so many things for many users besides my self, especially towards other developers. I have been communicating with a user outside of the forums about the situation who has been impacted by it, and he has came down to this after getting no information or help from moderation:
Roblox as a platform is too big to moderate by man power alone. It has also grown to the size and age where a company simply can’t function efficiently anymore. I don’t want to trash talk or anything, but the reality is that a lot of the people who make the decisions that impact us as developers and the player base, simply has never played Roblox and don’t actually understand it as intimately as they should.
I’m sure that there are plenty of rules given to moderators which don’t really make much sense (they don’t really like to share much information so I’m just going to assume that there’s more than what I’ve noticed on my own). Just to name one rule that doesn’t make much sense that I know of is that they’re not allowed to approve assets with images that can’t really be seen. So if I upload a simple 3x3 or 2x2 pixel texture (for low memory usage reasons, I purposely choose really small textures to ensure that the texture sizes don’t hog unnecessary memory), then it will be declined because they couldn’t see the texture. Either the moderation tools aren’t where they should be or this rule doesn’t work as intended.
Idk, just overall as a dev I find myself time and time again just face palming at how much of a hassle it is to upload assets.
Regarding the recent “audio exploit” which from what I can tell is really just a big mess up on Roblox’s part and I doubt even a slight percentage of the people who got banned did this intentionally as a way to make money. A bunch of users has contacted me on Twitter and Discord asking for help, random users that from what I can tell haven’t made a name for themselves yet so they don’t have access to the dev forums to complain. All I could do was to direct them to appeals. And hearing that the appeals guys just turn people away even after all of this is well… Extremely disappointing to say the least.
I doubt Roblox will be able to pull out a list of all users that got banned for this particular reason and restore their accounts. But considering how the mass plugin ban thing happened before, and now this? Honestly, I really hope Roblox will consider upgrading the moderation tools quite extensively and especially add some way to restore accounts on such large quantities as this. A case by case review doesn’t seem efficient enough and there is bound to be plenty of people falling between the cracks.
I doubt anything will change though as this will most likely fall upon deaf ears. But one can always dream.
Even users which are a part of the devforums are having an extremely difficult time restoring their accounts, making little to no progress themselves, as far as I am aware.
Why are high level power users assigned the same moderators as bots and bacon hairs? If I report someone for exploiting or selling robux offsite, it should be handled by a different moderation team then the guys who handle reports sent in by fpsplayerjohnny2006 complaining that “this guy keeps killing me in jailbreak”. High level power user’s image assets/textures should be handled by a different(and better trained) team than the moderators who moderate when BaconHairEarl uploads a picture of his dog that he found in his pictures folder.
Give devforum members and power users (users who have been on the platform for a long time, DevEx, have bought builders club for years, have millions of robux/ place visits, own huge groups, etc…) their own moderation team that’s trained differently, and have their own section of the devforum where they can be contacted.
(the usernames in this post are fictional and do not represent any actual users )
This reads a lot like ‘let’s make sure that the ones able to complain about it won’t face the problem any longer’. This reduces the overall visibility of the problem as a whole since high-profile users won’t bring it up, while anyone who isn’t part of the lucky few is completely abandonned.
When there is a problem for everyone, let’s make sure it’s solved for everyone, shall we?
They get hundreds if not thousands of false reports everyday by players while the 1 report that is actually important sent by a developer is now placed with the same people who get bot style replies.
This. Developers and non-Developers should be moderated separately (or developers being given a separate moderation channel) because of the fact that it seems there is just too many non-Developer reports that just drown out all the Developer reports who may have a more important report that should be handled as soon as possible.
Because that non-Developer who reported about another player who keeps killing him too much in a pvp game is not a serious enough report to be put above a potential serious situation that a Developer is reporting about. I get that’s why we have categories to choose when reporting but even then it feels like the reason Developers have to wait so long to get replies from an actual person because of this long queue of reports in all categories of reports, probably from kids choosing the wrong category when reporting, just a theory.
So just like how we have Moderation Review Requests for assets that get declined, we should also have another option that devs can use to report other stuff that can be very serious and needs to be seen as soon as possible and any devs who abuse this report option can be removed from it to keep this report option as professional as possible.
The audio refund incident needs to be checked over again. I highly doubt a single person glitched intentionally, I doubt that people even knew about the glitch; yet even so, got banned permanently over it. Even if somebody knew about it by some strange means, they shouldn’t be terminated. This is entirely on Roblox, not on the users at all, shame that from the looks of things they will not admit that they are clearly the ones entirely at fault here. People spent money on this, some even make a living off this, to have this happen up and one day is a terrifying even to think of.
I will not let this topic die until something is done about it, you should all do the same.
It would be amazing if they could just unban everybody affected by the incident and then give out an apology in some form or another. Admit that maybe they screwed up somewhere.
Just want to say that I actually got to meet with someone internally about moderation today. I can’t talk about specifics, but I can tell you that these concerns aren’t falling on deaf ears - they have seen the concerns here and they are definitely listening.
Definitely support this. It’s 2020 and ROBLOX Support still hasn’t changed from being an automated maze. Moderation is constantly ignoring users and has told me to cease sending emails for an issue that can be easily resolved. Upon asking them any question with vital importance or is something that the user needs to know to proceed with their issue, they provide a copypasta message and closes the email thread. Upon sending multiple emails to continue getting information (information that has been learned over different email threads instead of just one of them) I was told to cease and desist, to stop sending emails again.
Moderation can’t ever be close to sympathizing with players and developers and simply cannot understand what something means to us. The current system upheld by ROBLOX is not held up to the standards of the website today and I am holding ROBLOX Support in contempt and in cynical thoughts. I hope reforms can happen.
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