Suggestions For Improving The Moderation System

As a Roblox developer, I lose a lot of development time due to the moderation system. I would like to suggest some improvements.

1. Review Time
Currently, when an asset gets moderated, I need to submit a request to the Moderation forum on this site, in order to get the asset approved. The problem is that it can take anywhere from 1-3 days for a moderator to approve an asset. This is far too long, and it is extremely hard on our development schedule to wait for days for our own assets to be available.

Looking at the Moderation forum’s history, there are not that many new requests per day. So I would think that it is possible to speed up the review process. I suggest that you set a policy to have any asset reviewed within a certain amount of time. A turnaround time of 2-4 hours, during regular business hours seems quite reasonable, if you actively monitor the Moderation forum.

2. False Positives
I continue to get about 5-10% of my normal assets incorrectly moderated. These assets are usually 2D graphics such as images. These are common UI images such as buttons, labels, titles, product images, etc. They are just ordinary, regular images that should never be moderated in the first place. (I assume your algorithms moderate these by mistake).

I have also had assets moderated due to the filename of the images. For example, I prefixed some image names with “es-es” for Spanish localization, but those filenames caused the image uploads to fail. Why does the filename even matter?

3. Privacy
I see no reason why the Moderation forum should be public. Only the moderators can approve the assets, so why not just make the forum private? My moderation requests should just be between myself and the Roblox moderation team. This goes for my asset links as well, which I usually like to keep private. Maybe you can add another branch to the forum for private moderation requests.

4. Developer Trust
More trust should be given to proven developers with clean records. Your moderation system should take into account this trust level, and adjust your moderation accordingly.

5. Friendlier Notifications
The notifications, such as ban warnings, are over the top unfriendly and overhanded. Talking about making someone feel like a criminal. Maybe it is time to tone the messages down a bit.

In Conclusion
Anyway, I know moderation is a very tough job, and do appreciate all your hard work. But I am hoping you can implement some of these recommendations, especially the time it takes to review an asset, since it has a big impact on development time. Thank you.

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I agree with #2 and #5. While I have never gotten any warnings from asset creation ever, I do think the screen for feedback on rejected content could be a bit more ‘feedbacky’ and not so ‘hostile-looking’ (admit it, no one likes seeing the “Warning” text appear, especially from development).

However, #2 is debatable; some false-positives aren’t false but rather precautions (i.e uploading a solid white or black color might raise suspicion that it’s hiding something somehow). It’s happened to me but I just try something else and it works.

#3 is confusing; the moderation forum was and is always only for full members to see? If you mean having only moderators discuss moderation between the recipient and themselves, then that can be remedied in DM’s.

#4 is unlikely; it’s been discussed before and it could be abused or taken some other way. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love this to be a thing, as I frequently upload icons for a spawn UI (each at 380x380 pixels) for my train game.

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