The website needs a duplicate clothing filter

Feature Requests Website Features
#1

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!"

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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

  1. “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.

30 Likes
Site Bot Prevention/Captcha
#2

I believe a similar check is being done to allow duplicate assets to pass moderation (this is where the change-a-pixel idea comes from.)

I’m sure the algorithm they use for this just hashes the image and looks for that hash, which is many orders of magnitude more efficient than comparing every pixel in every image.

If this were added to clothing assets, clothing-stealers would only need to change a pixel to circumvent this. The alternative is to make the hash fuzzy, or implement ridiculous neural net that can tell if you’re stealing clothing assets.

Another possibility would be to use a proprietary image format that’s harder to steal, but all of these seem like a bit much.

8 Likes
#3

This topic is beat to death with no real answers on how to fix it, because at the end of the day there is always a “work around” or it’s “unfair”

Here are 5 Similar Threads

Policy suggestion; Copying Clothing for sale be against the rules

"[How To] Stop Clothing Copying"

https://devforum.roblox.com/t/stealing-clothing/12566

Max 1000 Clothing items per group/Account without manual approval

https://devforum.roblox.com/t/clothing-copies-and-tags/95124

As far as checking exact duplicates, Roblox does this already for verification reasons. If you upload a Decal that has already been uploaded and accepted before, it auto-accepts. (Same for Decline.)

The issue is, there is a lot of the Roblox Clothing Template that is blank space, so you just change a few of those pixels, and boom, upload.

4 Likes
#4

My Thread that you linked is still a viable solution. While it doesn’t remove the mass copied clothing from the catalog, it prevents further mass uploading by bots by making it economically non-viable to upload shirts by limiting the amount of shirts a bot can upload to aprox 999, as going to 1000 would put them under review and eventually deleted by an admin. This would serve to halt the mass bot uploads, and give roblox some time while they engineer UGC overhaul that would create a new catalog without the current issues.

On Topic: In the case that a UGC overhaul is added, a system similar to the OP should be part of that UGC overhaul.

3 Likes
#5

I mean, the fact of the matter is though that a user could get OBC, and upload 999 things, and then make a new group, and continue it over again. It still has mass workarounds to it. As someone who doesn’t sell a whole lot, it’s kinda upsetting to see my work stolen. Especially in how much of a niche market I work in. But that being said, I just have come to accepted that there isn’t anything that is very feasible for Roblox to actually stop it forever.

2 Likes
#6

Current bots are only able to make profit because they upload 250,000+ clothes and sell them, then sell the robux offsite, before they get banned. If they only are able to upload 1000 clothing items, then they will make about ~1/250th of the current profit they make right now. They would lose money by running these bots because you require builders club for each one.

2 Likes
#7

If you make 100 groups you’ll have 99,900 uploads available.
Obviously that’ll require 10,000 R$

But if each of the 99,900 uploads makes 6 R$ (3 sales at 5 R$ a piece after tax)
That’s 599,400 R$

More than enough to turn a profit. Just have to limit the bot to make sure it only uploads 999, and then stops, and then most it to the next group to do it all over again. It’ll cut down their automation tactics, for sure, but won’t stop them at all.

#8

I just checked up on an example of an account that owns 100 groups dedicated to uploading mass amounts of clothing. Each aprox had anywhere to 5000-15000 shirts/pants uploaded to it. The most robux any of those groups had in them was ~250 robux, with an average of about ~100. Taking into consideration that the account may have sold robux in some of these groups. They made ~25000 Robux. If they had uploaded only ~1000 and if the clothing per groups average is ~10000, then they would have only made 2500 Robux. From what i read on that account, the bot has been running for at least a month. They would have made ~6 dollars in the span of more than a month. That’s less than a penny per hour. If they were mining cyrptocurrency instead they would have made more money.

Of course the easier solution is to just make a max of 1000 clothing uploads per account per review, and not have a separate upload limit per group.

Edit: Would appreciate if this discussion could be moved to the original thread :yum:

2 Likes
#9

The only problem I see here is not all of the people botting may be in it for the profit.
You could just have some kid that’s dumb rich, and all they want is popularity for their group or to be noticed. In this case, just because it’s economically inconvenient it wouldn’t actually stop someone like this from botting clothing.

Even with your solution in place, people would still be able to bot, so it doesn’t actually solve the botting problem it just potentially slows it down.

#10

Your argument isn’t very coherent, I have no idea what you’re talking about :thinking:.

6 Likes