Suggestion regarding moderation and TeamCreate

Hello fellow Devforum members,

I am posting this petition on behalf of my friend TobiasGardiner, who owns the largest United Kingdom on ROBLOX (https://www.roblox.com/My/Groups.aspx?gid=2938975). He recently got banned for uploading improperly filtered chat in one of his group games. The problem with this, however, is that he has never (and I mean never) opened the studio for the game he got banned for. I have always been an advocate for TeamCreate (TC) and allowing certain ranks in groups to create and edit group games, but Roblox’s policy to punish and hold group and TC owners responsible for content (that they may not have uploaded) to their games is a huge step backwards.

This opens up a huge issue regarding account security. For example, if someone had a personal dispute with a group owner or TC owner and wanted to intentionally get them banned (or worse, terminated) all they would have to do is gain access to edit their game and upload improperly filtered chat or “Over 18” content without their consent. This idea is unfortunately not that far fetched.

This problem gets even worse with large group owners, or even a person that owns a lot of groups. TobiasGardiner owns a lot of groups that are linked to the main United Kingdom group, some of them with their own set of developers. As you can imagine, this gets impossible to keep track of. When he gets banned for something he didn’t do, he’s understandably furious.

These are some solutions he proposed:

Option A - Create a log that shows each person that last updated the game. Punish the last person to update the game when the violation in the Terms of Service started. Put the game under review and notify the owner.

Option B - Create a log that shows who created and edited what in studio. Punish the last person to edit the object in violation of the Terms of Service. Put the game under review and notify the owner.

Option C - Impose a place creation ban and take away edit powers on repeat offenders. Put the game in question under review and notify the owner. Punish the last person to update the game (Option A).

Option D - At the very least, stop punishing just the owner for offenses committed in group games and TC’s that multiple people have access to. Impose equal punishment for everyone who has had access to the game in the last 72 hours.

Please show your support for this petition by signing and/or add your ideas below.

Thanks!

39 Likes

As a developer, I agree that more should be done to protect those who are banned through the pretenses of other members. However, I don’t see an easy way of applying methods to combat this other than giving equal punishments to anyone who has accessed the game.

The moderation team (i believe) do not have physical access to game editing rights unless given (for both privacy, and security reasons), so Option B wouldn’t work (not to mention how storage heavy those logs would be, given that some games can have more than 200k parts in them). The issue with having a game taken down for improper filtering is that you can never tell if it is an intentional feature or not, so really what they should be doing for some form of punishment is warning the owner before issuing out a 3 day ban instantly. That way, they’ll have time to sort it out.

Regardless of the issues at hand, I believe this feature would actually be useful for all developers. We already have a version count but it’d be great to see who actually called those updates. There are many applications to this, like knowing if a developer worked on something at a specific time (pay rates per hour), or making sure changes aren’t made without permission. While I don’t know if this would have an application in moderation, this would most certainly help in the long run for small devs who are more prone to being scammed.

In my eyes, there are only a few options. We either issue warnings before and reviews before putting a faulty filtered game up, Automatically filter text before it is put through ChatService, or better yet, moderate the text put through by the client.

those are my ideas.

5 Likes

You as the owner of the place have the responsibility to ensure that whoever you end up giving access to editing a place via team create, is a trusted individual who will not mess around. It is easy to say that Roblox should do something about this but when viewing it from their perspective, there simply isn’t any good way for Roblox to impose moderation on team create servers and thus have to rely on the place owner to think before they let someone edit their places.

Option A would just be a mess, Team Create update the place file constantly and the log would be filled with hundreds of saves after just a few hours. Then we also have to take into account that what if there was multiple people in the server, and the other people in there did not know of what has occurred in the server but end up remaining in the server for longer than the person who uploaded bad content? If so, then their name would be shown on the list, not the bad guy.

Option B would not work, simply put a single developer alone would rack up hundreds if not thousands of individual notes. Now multiply that with however many devs you have.

Option C sounds would be viable to some extent, to put the game under review could do however this would only add to complicate the process and once again, it is the owner of the place who have to make sure that they only allow trusted developers to edit the place.

Option D No, just no. You can’t punish everyone for the actions of one user, it simply doesn’t work that way.

The reality is that there is no way for Roblox to do what you ask them to and if Roblox would try to meddle with moderation on Team Create chances are it would only mess things up. So, for this reason it is simply best if you don’t give access to random developers even though they have been in your group for x amount of time. If you can’t say that you fully trust the developer, then you shouldn’t give them access as they can steal all your hard work, mess with it as described in the original post, hide scripts to give them special powers in-game and other things to your creations.

A solution to this, which is something that you can do yourself is to simply make a holder alt account which owns the place or group which the place is being developed at. Do keep in mind that if you will working with animations, it is required that the animations are saved to whatever account that will own the place in the end or to the group that will end up having the place under their brand.

6 Likes

I agree with @DieSoft.
Who you give TC permissions is entirely the group owner(s) responsibility.
Besides, I don’t think TC was ment to be used as a “sandbox”.
(Example, keeping the place as TC and having devs make updates on it whenever and however they see fit)

Developers should be more working together as an actual team.
Schedule a day where you and your team will all go into TC and every dev will work on their own script, environment, etc.

It’s a lot easier to keep track of what everyone is doing that way.

2 Likes

I understand your concerns and I agree with that, however I feel that there are some flaws with that system. If a developer is coding some sort of script where he is going to process text and eventually show it to the client, the text must be filtered. In this particular example someone could easily forget to filter the text before showing it to other clients and I do not think that a ban should be initated for that immediately - or at least not for the place holder / group owner.

As @DieSoft said, a group holder account bypasses this issue, however that should not be necesarry.

2 Likes