On or slightly before June 18th 2024, Roblox mysteriously introduced a change to the Roblox filtering system which caused some of the players of my game Word Bomb to report that the chat was wildly censoring most of their messages. Initially, I chalked it up to the filter system being the filter system - being the black box we don’t understand, as the people reporting it were few and far between and me and many others were unable to reproduce it. After a couple days, another report of this from another player made be begin to suspect that something more was happening. I have never received so many reports within the same timeframe of an issue like this. After a thorough dive into the problem lasting many hours, trying everything we could, me and an interested player were able to figure out what exactly was causing the issue.
“Live Typing” in Word Bomb is the system the game uses in order to be able to show the current player’s typing to all of the other players. To accomplish this, whenever the player edits their text, via addition, removal, or complete change of the text within the TextBox, the text must be refiltered through the Roblox filtering system.
The following is not confirmed to be certain, but after extensive testing, I can be almost positive this is true:
The problem causing the extreme filtering to our game’s chat then arises with a change to Roblox’s filtering system, which is making it so that each and every string of text filtered for a specific player is also being used as a sort of “chat context” for filtering in future calls to the filter function.
This means that, when you type text in Word Bomb, in the Roblox filter’s view, you are actually sending many, many unfinished messages. This may look like this to the filter:
T TR TRE TREE TREEH TREEHO TREEHOU TREEHOUS TREEHOUSE
We can’t be certain why the Roblox filter doesn’t like this, but we can make a good guess that it’s because of the nature of these strings. These are strange, unfinished strings of text. Maybe it sees it as spam, maybe it thinks the nature of the words being unfinished is malicious and that it’s a player trying to form a chat bypass.
Whatever be the case, NOW, if you are to send messages in the Word Bomb chat, the filter has a much higher chance of simply blocking anything you type. It doesn’t matter what you type, it will block it all. And this can likely last for many, many messages. I’ve personally had my messages blocked up to 6 and even 7 times, and I was typing DIFFERENT messages each time.
I wasn’t able to find a guaranteed word that causes the Roblox filter to go haywire, but people have mentioned that longer words are more likely to cause this to happen.
As of the time of writing this, Word Bomb now slightly mitigates this issue by prepending each call to the filter with a various assortment of strings such as: “my solution is …”, “i am typing the word …”, and etc. which I’ve found to make the filtering slightly less egregious. But it is STILL a major problem to this day, and I still get reports about it all the time! This is not a fix!
I am very aware that June 18th 2024 is a very long time ago to report this issue now (sadly I didn’t have permission to post bug reports), and “undoing” what initially may have caused the initial filtering issue may not be feasible at this point - since many variables could have changed by now. Due to the nature of this bug, and the fact that the Roblox filter deals with keeping the platform safe, I don’t expect it to be simply reverted. If possible, I’d like a way to filter text which is SPECIFICALLY made for contextless applications, whether that be passed as an argument or option to already existing filter functions, or a new function entirely. It is unfortunate that simply “adding another filter function” is most likely not going to be the way to go, since there are already 57 different deprecated filtering functions, and adding another easily misuseable filtering function can cause problems, so I unfortunately can’t suggest an easy fix. Thanks for reading, and I hope this problem was at the very least amusing.