Trusted users quick asset moderation

I wanted to concept an idea that would be helpful for asset developers, especially those of clothing and whatnot.

What I’d love to see is a system that identifies trusted users to bypass the moderation queue for their uploads. This would help recurring uploaders get their assets out sooner without waiting for things to pend.

Of course, this is just an idea, and it’s not flawless.

Users that could be allowed to bypass the pend would be determined on many different angles:

  • Years on ROBLOX (Veterans badge?) would help determine that the user is familiar with rules.
  • Little or no moderation history in the past (taking in account for appeals)
  • Quantity of content uploaded over time (if there’s lots, would this would help speed up other moderation?)
  • Quality of assets (are any past assets sketchy?)
  • ROBLOX subscription / membership / rbxdev / devex / employee status
  • Reputation (is the user known for flaming / toxic attitude / potential system abuse)
  • other things

A system like this could benefit both users and moderation staff, with trusted users being able to bypass the system, it will reduce some of the load of content moderators need to go through (as far as time goes, anyway), and would allow users to not have to wait anywhere from 5 minutes to 8 hours on a given day for a asset to be approved.

Alternatively, the system could be changed to allow for assets from trusted users to be uploaded and approved automatically after upload, but remain in the queue, and if the moderation team later sees it and revokes it, then it would become unavailable then after - and future use of the system could be revoked aswell.

Identifying of these uses could be seen as a ROBLOX badge that would tell the public they are trusted by moderation, or another form of discreet personal identification, as to not let the public know of this and have them exploit the users abilities to bypass moderation.

I don’t know, it seems like a neat idea that I’ve been thinking of.

I suppose methods of determining these users could range from applications on the forums, to automated allowance based on moderation history and asset bulk. But of course a system that would be fair for everyone would be up to ROBLOX,

What do you think?

  • This is useful and beneficial
  • This is pointless and destructive

0 voters

1 Like

Bypassing moderation in any sort of form would probably harm Roblox’s rating if intentional.
If you don’t have the foresight to upload anything that may take a long time to moderate ahead of the release you need to get better at planning or delay your releases.

Eh I really need a third option “This is useful when altered a bit”.
Bypassing moderation won’t happen.
Maybe having people be moved to the front of the queue… possible.
(unlikely, but still possible, unlike the whole bypass-idea)

Sounds like a fair alternative, I don’t imagine moderators stare at images for over 30 seconds, so while it wouldn’t reduce workload for moderators, it can provide an advantage to trusted users, and it wouldn’t interfere too badly with other peoples uploads (unless moving users to the front of the queue becomes so popular that other people don’t get moderated for a week).

Interesting thought.

Yeah, we don’t want starvation of apparent untrusted users. Surely this is just making the rich, richer by having them wait less time. Development should be a level playing field for all.

6 Likes

Considering how often people here on the dev forum to get their accounts broken into, I don’t think something like this would work without consequences.

All it would take is someone with malicious intent and access to someone with permissions to approve of rule-breaking assets to drag ROBLOX’s name into the mud.

I’ve never had an issue with the time it takes, my only issue is if I have to change a single pixel, I should just be able to re-upload the same image and ask for it to be re-moderated.

Ofcourse.

But, what I’m saying is that, if GOOD people are also frequent uploaders, then an array of people with constant positive intentions could be trusted by moderation to be positive enough to not need to be moderated, or atleast not be moderated so closely.

While I believe that most people on this forum won’t post huge amounts of porn on ROBLOX if a feature like this happens (I hope), if a user did do that, their newfound advantages can be revoked forever, and they could even be sent on a meeting with the banhammer.

@Vorlias
That, is clearly a very obvious issue with this system, with that in mind, this concept will definently need some more security and intent behind the users with this trusted status.

@Brad_Sharp
Speaking from experience of uploading clothing consistently over the past 4 years, I can say that I always see the system fluctuate. For the past several months, my clothing has often been literally instant, while now and later on it appears to be taking several hours.

Course, It’s not a problem to wait that long, just antsy is all. But I still think this is an interesting idea.

Just put through people on priority who get at least 100k visits monthly.

As a person who doesn’t get 100k visits monthly (I’m not a front page game developer for a reason), I don’t like that.
And even people who get 100k visits monthly aren’t necessarily trustworthy on any account.

1 Like

And anyone who hasn’t been a member of ROBLOX for a super long time, has moderation issues in the past (e.g. I have tons of offsite link warnings for posting imgur links even though the images themselves were appropriate for ROBLOX), doesn’t have BC, didn’t DevEx, etc isn’t going to like your idea.

Jumping ahead in the queue isn’t fair across the board, and bypassing the moderation queue has issues. Neither is a good solution. You can see assets as soon as you upload before they’re reviewed, so the only issues with assets not being reviewed instantly that I can think of are:

  • You instantly publish to the production version of the place and players can’t see your assets. This can be resolved by using a testing place (which you should be doing anyway) before publishing to the main place, and waiting to publish to main when all assets are finished being reviewed

  • Other developers in team create can’t see what you uploaded. There should be an option to see unreviewed assets uploaded by others who have access to Team Create in a place/group – all three of us who are working on Hooked are 18+ years old, so there’s no need to protect us from unmoderated content

It’s beneficial, but scary. There will always be cases where someone puts something up that shouldn’t be there.

I think they should just focus on the speed of moderation in general. I imagine that they contract that work out?

The only way I can imagine them speeding up moderation is through either hiring more people to review uploads or some attempt at automated review. The latter would be really difficult to get to a state where it’d be reliable, and I’m not sure hiring more moderators is worth improved moderation speeds. For instance, let’s say ROBLOX doubles their upload moderation force – instead of assets taking 1-2 hours to pass review, it takes 30 minutes to an hour. How does that help? Does it really make such a huge difference that you’re able to release an update half an hour earlier? And that’s with the review force doubled – hiring on only a handful of them will make even less of an impact.

We need to look at why non-instantaneous upload speeds are a problem in the first place, and mitigate those. In my previous post I guessed at two and ways they could be fixed. Are there any issues that I missed?

I’d suggest taking loleris a little less seriously here on the forums haha.


My opinion is that uploading time is the issue, not the moderation time. There’s always multiple decals I would like to upload, but ROBLOX makes me upload them all one by one with it’s low website loading times (Mainly the develop page, which is another issue). Being able to bulk upload with a limit of 5-10 decals would be optimal for me as a regular developer.

I am sure ROBLOX already checks moderation time to see whether they have enough staff for user experience to be minimally affected. The only other reason they’d hire more staff for moderation is if they had an overflow of money and decided to split some of it onto the moderation team. So we gotta make good games before we get returned with faster moderation times in that case :stuck_out_tongue:

2 Likes

Yep. This is something that definitely should be built into the site. You can currently do this through studio and upload multiple images, but 1) they’re assets for the game they’re uploaded in. They can be used in other games, but it doesn’t seem right to use images uploaded as a game asset in another game – those should be uploaded to an account or group instead. And 2) this can only be done with images. What if you want to upload 10 audio clips at once?

There’s also a Chrome extension that enables you to upload multiple assets at once, but as someone who used Firefox for the longest time, this is definitely a feature I’d want to see on the main site. The Develop page is due for an overhaul, so hopefully this is one of the new features it gets in that process.

I use a chrome extension that allows me to upload as many images, shirts/pants and whatnot to ROBLOX at once.

I mean usually my assets are approved in 10 minutes so I don’t see the issue. :stuck_out_tongue:

Yeah, because a user like me who has been a member for more than 7 years, hasn’t had any sort of moderation in 2+ years, or any legitimate asset denials should totally be served on the same priority level as a potentially abusive new user. Sure there’s a lot of grey areas with who can be trusted and who cannot be, but in general a good criteria can be someone who participates in DevEx and hasn’t had moderation in a year.

This isn’t a starvation of untrusted users. It’s being more efficient with users that ROBLOX knows they can trust. Also, these users are the ones that bring in the most profit for ROBLOX.

Ozzypig, is it really important that your assets’ moderation takes 30 minutes instead of an hour? It’s not efficient if it’s not accomplishing at least something. Releasing an update 30 minutes earlier doesn’t change anything.

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It does change something when you are in a rush, trying to get your update out because your game is on the front page, notice one of your assets has been falsely denied (we should be notified about this!) and now have to sit through 2 hours of moderation before it is finally allowed to load for your players.

I haven’t been hit with this in a long time, partially because of learning how to schedule as well as making sure I split up my assets (one example is to never place text directly on your image but instead upload the background and use SurfaceGUI to layer textlabels) but I do find it somewhat ridiculous my assets are in the same queue as those who flood the system and waste resources with their copyrighted google image search uploads.

I would pay for moderation priority.