There is a SERIOUS problem with Voice Chat moderation.
Today, me and a lot of other people in our 17+ experience, “On Tap” have been suspended from voice chat for doing absolutely nothing. We never thought it would be a problem in our experience but now it is. Users have the ability to go into experiences and spam report users and get them suspended from voice chat experiences without any type of review. We tested this and also have seen other scenarios where users join an experience without saying a single word, purposely ask their friends to spam report and get their voice chat suspended.
As a creator and user on this platform, it would be nice to know the process that a report goes through to determine the moderation action done to someone’s account.
Do these reports get reviewed by a human?
What deems to be a valid reason for a voice chat suspension?
Why are people getting suspended from voice chat without even saying a word in game?
How is botting allowed?
Why is there no leniency on 17+ servers where all users are required to be 17+, can users in 17+ not be moderated for cursing?
Allowing users to abuse the system can absolutely kill communities and experiences that are surrounded around socializing. Voice moderation in 17+ experiences should have more leniency in moderation or undergo an actual process with real human review. There are no solutions that we can figure out except for telling people in the game not to spam report but what does that even do? We can’t remove the ability for people to report because there are users that actually deserve to be VC suspended. We can’t find the people spam reporting and ban them from our experience. We are hopeless in this situation.
A lot of users are being banned/suspended from VC for very unjust reasons, many times not even knowing what reason they were banned for specifically. Users are able to abuse and spam report to get individuals banned which is toxic. It’s time to address this issue and take a look at the VC moderation process. Thank you for taking your time to read this.
When dealing with VC-related user reports, it is clear that there is no review procedure in place.
Roblox appears to suspend/ban everyone who receives enough reports, regardless of whether or not that user did anything wrong.
Also, it appears that there is no means to challenge these “suspensions” unless they are escalated to a ban?
In the case of On Tap, the vast majority of in-game staff, who are responsible for controlling the game and banning users who do, in fact, abuse the voice chat feature, have had their ability to interact and communicate with players suspended, effectively removing their ability to moderate those users who use the feature in bad faith.
I am writing to voice my concern about the state of the voice chat moderation on Roblox. I wholeheartedly agree with fouledAnchor and wish to highlight some of these issues in the hopes that Roblox will take action and fix them.
Exploitable Reporting System: The fact that individuals can target innocent users is ridiculous. The fact that voice chat suspensions can be triggered without a form of human review is a significant flaw that needs urgent attention.
Impact on Community and Socialization: Roblox’s entire platform is based on social interactions and when a user can abuse that it ruins it for that individual for potentially up to 3 days.
Appeals Process Delays and Ineffectiveness: Beyond the initial suspension, the appeals process itself presents challenges. The estimated wait time of 5-7 business days before receiving even an automated response adds frustration to the already stressful situation. Often, the first response does not adequately address the issue, leaving users without the ability to restore their voice chat privileges.
These are just a few things that have been bothering me, and I wanted to share my thoughts on this problem.
Voice chat moderation really needs a proper review process.
I know some people who have just disabled their voice chat altogether to avoid getting suspended, and it really shouldn’t come to that. In these 17+ Games, people feel comfortable swearing and whatnot, especially in the Games centered around alcohol consumption, but god forbid you let a swear word slip, and one report later, you get Voice Chat banned for 3–7 days.
I can agree with this statement. Since the increase in 17+ games, VC bans have been taking place more than ever for no reason. What is the point of 17+? Seriously useless.
I don’t understand how people can get moderated for swearing in a 17+ game. I’m sure that people who play games that are 17+ (assuming that they ARE themselves 17+) then they should have no problem with it. Not to mention the fact that you can get moderated for not even saying anything. There are countless videos on YouTube of people testing out VC moderation just to see how easy it is to get banned. Luckily VC bans don’t actually add up cause if they did, I’d be perma banned lol.
Voice chat moderation is a joke, I have to be pretty upfront on it.
All it takes is one report, and regardless if you were even the target of the report, Roblox will cut your access to voice chat if you were swearing or doing anything they deem to be problematic. I’ve had so many of my close friends moderated for such petty shit that I’m frankly sick of it.
There needs to be explicit reasoning provided for what specific rule you violated, and there needs to be an appeal process that doesn’t take more than a day to get a response for.
The amount of videos I have seen across social media of people joining VC servers with the sole purpose of reporting everyone is insane. Because of mass false reports like this many people I know have been VC banned. This moderation system feels so backwards and needs to be looked into.
I’m assuming that this is to maintain equal rights across countries. Maybe some country does not allow swearing in the 17+ rating? It could be way more complicated than that, but this is just my assumption.
Quick update and a bump:
I just watched a guy go into a 40+ member server and completely gut it and there was nothing I could do to stop him. Anyone who had their vc on was getting banned not just from the game or just getting kicked but being banned from roblox. I couldn’t even ban the guy because he was using alts to keep draining the server.
For now, I recommend temporarily disabling Voice Chat from all your servers to prevent moderation from being abused. In addition, please be sure to add an account age limit to prevent exploiters from using alts.
Random people do it, they can be any account age and the worst of it is we can’t tell who. It’s a Roblox issue, it’s been happening on my 17+ game too, we try to take action on users who abuse it but even myself have been effected by this. So has my moderators which makes them unable to moderate our voice chats. It’s a very broken system, whatever they’re using for this is very broken.
Sadly, due to the nature of the moderation, I’d recommend disabling spatial voice altogether to keep users safe from rogue moderation.
Unless you game actually needs it to function, that is. Although you may experience initial backlash, it will improve your game’s community in the long term, as many bad actors use spatial voice for malicious uses.
