The safety of the community continues to be one of our top priorities. We are grateful for the work developers have been putting into their games and experiences to protect our users’ safety and privacy. With your help, we believe that we can build a better, safer platform for all players.
We’d like to turn our attention to the future of Filtering Enabled (FE), which will help us further evolve our community safety standards. While FE has always been a strongly encouraged practice, today we are communicating how we will be taking steps to implement its use across the platform.
Over the next couple of months, we will begin instituting a new policy that will restrict discovery of non filtering enabled content for certain young age groups. We ask that you please consider acting now—if you haven’t already—to evaluate whether your game(s) needs development to be Filtering Enabled. Going forward, non-FE games will be restricted to older audiences. If your current target audience includes younger players, we encourage you to begin implementing FE now. To help better understand your games audience, Roblox will be releasing new tools that will allow developers to better track the age group and spending habits of your users.
In order to better community knowledge of FE and the required development practices, we have released new wiki articles explaining the technology. This includes information on Developing with FE, Converting old places to FE, and an explanation of Remote Events and Functions. If you still have questions please post them to the soon to be created FE Support category in the developer forums. This section will be visible to all users when it goes live within the next few weeks.
While we work towards our platform goals, we hope to ensure all developers have the resources to thrive. In the coming weeks we plan to release a detailed post outlining what changes are coming and when. This post is designed to give advanced notice for users who will need to make changes to their existing projects or may be starting new projects.
Thank you all for your patience and understanding.
This widens the skill gap, but I think this is worth it in the long run so long as Roblox is completely clear in what ways a developer is limiting themselves by not using FilteringEnabled.
Will the ability to be found by older audiences change other than broad user exposure?
And would creating a entrance place be a viable method of creating a semi-enforced age guideline?
Additionally, despite working with FE for a while, RemoteEvent/Functions are still a little convoluted in which events do what, first time users of FE may have a hard time trying to work this out.
It was only a matter of time.
I’m rather eager to see this applied to the Popular sort. I think it’ll destroy a large portion of those poorly rated “fake games”.
Also, really glad with this decision as it will help crack down on clickbait games that reel in younger audiences, only to present them with poor and insecure gameplay.
Very excited for this. Not only will this benefit developers who actually create great titles that are currently being thrown in the shadows due to poor spammy games hogging front page, but this is going to increase the positive reputation of ROBLOX because Youtubers are going to now play only the Filtering Enabled games (typically FE games are of good quality!) instead of those terrible spammy games(Minecraft Obbies, Fake Sponsored Games, etc.)
Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but usually the more complicated a game is the harder it is to convert it to FE. Many of the spammy and clickbait games that often find themselves on the front page would be incredibly easy to convert to FE.
This isn’t necessarily true because it’s possible for a player to join a one-player server which was recently vacated by another player. So any modifications made by the previous player would be visible to the new player.
In the future Console and other platforms might play together, so you have to apply filtering on each platform. Each platform can be exploited by the way, it’s just that it’s harder to get third party tools on XBOX that can interfere with running games, if there are any that do that at all. That doesn’t mean there won’t ever be an exploiting application like that in the future though.
Why don’t we have FE on by default already anyways? Most games that rely on FE being disabled should still be able to work regardless; all this does is encourage good practice.
To clarify, does this mean that non-FE games will be discontinued entirely at some point in the future, or just that they’re only going to be seen/playable by older audiences?