Sunsetting User-to-User Inbox Messaging

[Negativize]

Yeah, my response was sarcastic I had over 15,000 posts in Off Topic

[Karasuneth]

Not all developers that need feedback are those that create experiences. This only covers as a replacement for developers with experiences. What about developers that aren’t making experiences, and are making other products on this platform? The form embedding is neat indeed, but it’s not a solution available to everyone.

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In general [not addressed to reply], these sorts of changes are unfortunately rarely considered outside the context of how they affect developers other than experience devs. We get further and further buried under messy workarounds that are incredibly inconvenient and not at all intuitive to the people who need to give us feedback.

Communities/forums sound nice as an improvement on groups to aid this, but I’m not hearing much about if it’ll be looked into on how they can be promoted by developers that make other types of content. And, as noted, they seemingly won’t be available before this change.
I’m not necessarily against the sunsetting of inbox messaging, but it is important that feasible, intuitive replacements for feedback are released first, for all branches of developers. Not just for experiences.

[ernakou]

There are times when players have private issues that need an individual, private response. Messages serve that purpose. Messages sent per day fails to capture the whole story here. If you don’t see your barber every day, should we not have barbers? If you have a box of screwdrivers and throw out the ones that see less use, what happens when you need a specific size and no longer have it? If you can create a one-size-fits-all communication system, then by all means do it. However, seeing that a proper replacement for messages does not yet exist, this change feels like a downgrade.

[Beelzepupz (beelzebub)]

I feel like there’s a bunch of other options before sunsetting this feature. Message requests, spam detection… you don’t have to give up on messaging yet. I use it much more than chats (which are intrusive and buggy to use.)

[AVeryFancyDoctor]

They even mention a small group is using this. Meaning it would be easy to moderate. This update is terrible.

[SPOOK_EXE (spook)]

Just as with the TalentHub and DevForum, DONT sunset the feature until the REPLACEMENT is live and is MAJORITVELY okay to work with. We don’t want another TalentHub hate train to go again.

My opinion: this feature should be kept and updated, no reason for it to be removed apart from the scam messages which haven’t been attempted to be dealt with - lazy way out.

[The13thHippie (Vilkata)]

Let’s break this down, shall we? Maybe then Roblox administration will understand just where we’re coming from:

@Roblox

Low Usage, Engagement and Quality: We recognize that Inbox has been an available channel to communicate with other users for a long while. However, when we looked at recent data, we observed a low number of messages per day being sent on the platform and even lower replies to messages. In addition, a significant portion of those messages were identified as spam.

The answer is simple: Your filter is awful and sucks. When/If we send a message, we’re lucky if the whole thing doesn’t just say “######## ###### ### ########”. Worse, we have no idea what word triggered the censor, and we don’t even know if we got filtered to begin with unless we either check the Sent tab in messages, or the user replies to us!

@Roblox

New Ways to Connect With Your Community: We understand that some creators may use Inbox Messaging as a way to directly communicate with users to provide updates and receive feedback and customer support requests. Last month at RDC, we announced that Roblox Groups will be known as Communities. We intend for Communities to be the destination for creators to build relationships with and gain valuable feedback from their loyal user base. We have also started providing tools for creators to communicate with their community, such as Announcements , and we’re actively working on the upcoming launch of Forums, which will allow users to provide feedback and report issues.

This is just slapping a band-aid on a much larger wound and hoping it works. Above all else, you know how bad forums can get. You also know how awful group communities can, and will, be. Just look at any large group wall. A change to groups, while sorely needed, is not the answer to your current dilemma with messages.

@Roblox

Safety: We are continuously looking for ways to ensure safety on the Roblox platform. The ability to message any user using Inbox messaging could pose safety risks, especially for our youngest users. To keep our users safe, private messaging through chat requires you to first add them to your friends list. This change will ensure that moving forward, direct messaging within the Chat tab is with people you expect to hear from and also help reduce messages identified as spam.

Yeah, no. That is 100% on you and your fault. You preach safety while allowing the worst kinds of people to continue being on Roblox. Not one of us have forgotten how long it’s taken you to deal with specific players who have had unsavory acts get brought to light. I also will not be adding random people I don’t know to my friend’s list, just so they can message or chat with me.

@Roblox

Users can continue to message others on their friend list on Roblox via our other communications channels. Users can navigate to the “Chat” tab on both mobile and desktop to continue to communicate with others via text (and soon voice!). You can learn more about how to chat with others here .

Your chat feature is one of the worst I have ever had the misfortune to experience on a website. It is still, even after all these years, buggy, and your filter, as mentioned before, is actually garbage, as even normal, innocent words are filtered for seemingly no reason. This has been an issue for years, and something people complained about since the old forums were still a thing. Nobody likes the chat feature. We actively go out of our way to avoid using it because of how bad it is, and will default to other websites over the chat system.

This course of action is not the answer to your problem. If you had been better with your moderation, had taken actual steps to prevent bots and the messages that bots post (which is not restricted to messages, by the way. They happen on group walls, happen in games, and will happen on your community forums), then it would not have gotten this bad. Your biggest developers, everybody on the old forums, and even people here on the DevForums, have spoken out against how bad you are at moderation and keeping users safe.

Sunsetting messages is not the way to go, especially with how bad your filter and chat system are.

[Linmidy]

I can feel it that this will be yet another forum/public audio situation, where feature is removed, and years go by until it’s replacement is finally made functional.

[Ellableu1234 (mint)]

don’t sunset this. the chat list is not a good sollution for this, developers who have max friends will not be able to contact the other if messages are going to be disabled. i know that theres going to be a solution to ts, the forums which are coming back but i know nothing about yippee!!, but like @SPOOK_EXE said, provide a solution when you discontinue this

[AlteFore (IllIlIIllIIIlllI)]

Until you add an actual viable alternative (THAT DOESN’T ENTAIL FRIENDING EVERYONE I WANT TO TALK TO), this will be a terrible, boneheaded, thoughtless update. Although I guess that’s all you ever do anymore, isn’t it?

Why listen to what everyone is saying and do this the RIGHT way, when you can just do it the quick and easy way and eat another 50% drop in your stock value?

[AceKiron (Ace)]

Please don’t!

One of the best friends I’ve ever made dropped out of our school about a year ago, but it turns out he still plays on his Roblox account sometimes. He may not be online often, let alone check his inbox, but it’s my only chance of talking to him again.

[subramlet (HumanoidRootPart)]

wasn’t messages used to contact game creators about inquires
this is useless to sunset an important thing that we need, neither its impossible to communicate with famous creators once this gets removed

[AstraNeutral (Astra)]

I’m very disappointed in the removal of User-to-User Inbox Messaging. This is a really bad update that WE expected from Roblox. Honestly, does Roblox care about us anymore? i don’t think so.

[Blafert]

As a dev that rarely gets some great feedback using this system, do not remove it. People who follow me, can just send their feedback. Through groups it can either get lost or people do not feel free to share it. Use chat for that? Of course not.

[Reinitialized]

I still don’t understand all of the panic around this. We already have a Roblox supported alternative to the deprecation of User to User messaging: The DM feature on the Devforums.

While I do agree it’s not as noticeable and introduces a bit of friction for some legitimate users, this also has advantages:

• This same barrier will significantly reduce the amount of low quality messages you’ll receive.
• Although I would like to see the Devforums DM functionality integrated into the main website/mobile app, you can temporarily work around this by putting a link to your Devforums profile in your About Me summary.
• Discourse, the forum software we’re actively using, is significantly better at taking care of junk messages. It’s one of its core features, and something the current built-in User to User direct messaging system severely lacks in.

TL:DR) Relax guys, it’s not as big of a deal as y’all are making it out to be. We already have an alternative even if it’s not as easy to use.

[Abcreator]

@Reinitialized

The DM feature on the Devforums

There are a few caveats to this:

• Many developers do not use the DevForum as actively as the Roblox website, and hence may end up missing quite a few messages or end up with late replies. Some of which do not check the forum in months.
• Afaik users must have ‘Member’ on the forum to initiate a message, that leaves a lot of players who are not developers with no method of contacting the developer. Yes, they could farm read-time, but that’s basically just a workaround, if anything.
• There isn’t really an expectation of using DevForum messages as a form of developer-developer contact and there isn’t a filter between staff messages and normal user messages so many people decide to turn on the setting so only staff can contact them via messages. This could be argued to be on the case on the Roblox site, too, but it’s much easier to tell apart a Roblox logo in a message than what could be a random staff’s username.

[Bobytoeburrito (Innovator)]

This is an absurdly poor decision. Users will be left with no way to contact people without being on their friends list. I use messages so people can reach out to me in games I’m a developer/admin for. Just two days ago I had someone reaching out telling me how much they loved my game asking how its effects were accomplished. With this update, users that want to specifically contact someone they’re not friends with will not have a reasonable option to do so.

Bear in mind that dm’s are disabled by default upon account creation, so there’s already bias in the usage statistics. I’ve had plenty of users not understand that they can’t contact me because of their own settings.

[ow9u]

my message wont change the decision of giant company, but it seems stupid that you can’t handle maintaining such a feature like this

[KingDestroyer_4 (KingDestroyer)]

Fun Fact: Roblox Games used to have Comment Sections underneath which was used for feedback aswell!

[OutlawArchitect (Outlaw)]

I wholly agree with this! Roblox has had an unfortunate track records in recent years/updates of sunsetting valuable features without a sustainable replacement for it.

The platform’s horrendous auto-chat filter hardly even allows you to communicate with another friend, co-developers, etc. about ways to contact you on other platforms. Personally, I do not believe that solely relying on in-game chats or Groups… excuse me, Communities, to convey communications is the most effective transition.