As a Roblox user, it is currently hard to find unique clothing because the entire catalog is spammed with bots uploading the same clothing over and over again. For example, if you type “hoodie” into the search bar this shows up. "what a choice I have!"
This is all over Roblox and is not only a problem for the community but I’m sure its a problem for Roblox because of the storage it takes up, let’s do the math, shall we?
Each template you publish takes up about 50.9 KB (52,170 bytes) of data.
Now let’s assume there are hundreds of copies of shirts like this (Which there are). If there are 150 shirts that are exactly the same then that would take up (50.9 x 150 = 7635 KB (7.635 MB))
That doesn’t seem like a lot, but considering there are thousands of shirt spams around the site and its still growing, that number has probably reached a few terabytes by now, that’s space that users and developers could be using to create games and upload files that are actually useful, and that’s money Roblox has to spend on buying more storage space.
Now let’s look at the POV of the average Roblox user.
You’re looking for a new shirt to wear to your favorite Roblox hangout, you type “blue hoodie” in the catalog and see a spam of one shirt for pages upon pages. Eventually, you get tired of it and just give up because it’s just plain annoying. Even if you were to continue to the next set of pages it would just be another shirt spammed like crazy.
A simple solution that should have been added from the start
Add a simple filter that checks for matches of the same shirt during the verification process. If an exact copy is found maybe even give the user a link to the shirt.
This solution will also help prevent the shirt stealing problem going around.
If you don’t want to do something like this per upload at least run this filter like once a month or something.
Counter arguments
- “Roblox has hundreds of thousands of shirts in their catalog wouldn’t it be inefficient to check all of them everytime a shirt is uploaded?”
There are many simple solutions to this problem, and I’m sure Roblox’s team could figure them out without my help. Once they run the filter through the catalog once that number will be chopped in half.