The reason why your Roblox settings reset sometimes - AuthFailed 403 Authentication Failed

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Description

Did you ever encounter a case where your Roblox Settings suddenly just reset? e.g. your GlobalBasicSettings_13.xml for example, just suddenly got overwritten by Roblox themselves?

I just happened to find a case where this will always happen. When there’s an Authentication Error, Roblox Client and most likely Studio as well, will reset your settings…

This shouldn’t happen.

Please note that this happens for the Roblox Client as well for the Roblox Studio. The cases below just emulate a case where this happened. However, it should point towards the issue in order to fix the whole problem, hopefully.

 

Re-production Steps

See note in private message for the video.

  • Back up your Settings at %localappdata%/Roblox because you will lose them after following the steps below.

Preparation:

  • Open Roblox, and resize your window so that you will immediately see the difference for later
  • Close you Roblox
  • Open it again to ensure that resizing your window changed? (Roblox should be starting up with how you left the window resized)

Emulating the issue:

  • Log-in with Roblox in your Browser
  • In the same browser copy paste the following into a new tab into the URL
roblox-player:1+launchmode:play+gameinfo:ABC+launchtime:1758040833024+placelauncherurl:https%3A%2F%2Fwww.roblox.com%2FGame%2FPlaceLauncher.ashx%3Frequest%3DRequestGame%26placeId%3D6516141723%26isPlayTogetherGame%3Dfalse%26referredByPlayerId%3D0%26joinAttemptId%3Dabc%26joinAttemptOrigin%3DPlayButton+robloxLocale:en_us+gameLocale:en_us+LaunchExp:InApp

This above is intentionally wrong to simulate the issue.

  • If you get prompted that it wants to start Roblox, press the confirm button.
  • Wait until something starts
  • You should now get a window that says something like 403 Authentication Failed
  • Close it
  • Wait a bit
  • Open Roblox again
  • You should now notice that Roblox opened up in windowed mode covering your entire desktop bounded screen. (This indicates that the settings were reset)

 

Expected Result

That Roblox leaves my settings in peace.

Actual Result

Your settings get overwritten with a “reset” version. In the Roblox Player’s case it would reset GlobalBasicSettings_13.xml.

A private message is associated with this bug report

6 Likes
2

Hey Karl, thanks for the report and the detailed repro steps. We will take a look at this.

1 Like
3

Bump. This is very frustrating when it happens, although I don’t get authentication failures randomly.

Note that this is what GlobalBasicSettings is overwritten with when the client fails to start:

<roblox xmlns:xmime="http://www.w3.org/2005/05/xmlmime" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="http://www.roblox.com/roblox.xsd" version="4">
	<External>null</External>
	<External>nil</External>
</roblox>

In other words, it omitted the UserGameSettings instance, but otherwise successfully serialized it. It also overwrites the file (with valid data) every time it starts (successfully or not), which seems redundant to me but probably has a good reason.

Removing the normal user’s permission to Write this file doesn’t work because the client deletes it and then writes a new file. Removing the Delete special permission has never prevented Roblox from deleting a file in my experience, either.