Unbans for individuals flagged as alternative accounts

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Hello Roblox Team and Developers,

I’d like to bring attention to a significant issue that many of us have encountered: the inability to unban individual accounts that have been automatically flagged as alternate accounts without also unbanning the main account that was originally banned.

The Problem:

Currently, when an account is banned off an experience, any account that the system identifies as an alternate of the banned account is also automatically banned. Specifically, we do not have the ability to reverse these bans for the allegedly alternate accounts without also unbanning the main account, which is not always appropriate or justified.

Examples of “False Bans”:

  • Stats Transfers from Compromised or Terminated Accounts: In some cases, users might have moved stats from an old or compromised account to a new one. However, if the original account was later banned, the system might wrongly identify the new account as an alternate and ban it too, even though the new account itself did nothing wrong.
  • Shared IP or HWID Among Household Members: Many households share the same IP address or hardware ID (HWID), leading to multiple accounts being flagged as alternates even though they belong to different individuals. If one account in the household is banned, others might be wrongly caught in the crossfire, leading to innocent users being unfairly punished.

We urgently need a solution that allows us to unban individual accounts marked as alternates without needing to unban the main account that was initially banned.

Possible Solutions:

  • IP/HWID Exemptions for Households: Implement a mechanism that recognizes when multiple accounts share an IP or HWID but are not linked in any other way [Personal Info etc.], preventing automatic bans based on these criteria alone.
  • Manual Review Option: Provide developers the ability to manually review and unban individual accounts that were flagged as alternates, especially in cases where there’s clear evidence that the ban was applied in error.

I believe that implementing one or more of these solutions would greatly improve the fairness and accuracy of the ban system.

Thank you for considering this issue and I look forward to the community’s and Roblox team’s thoughts on potential solutions.

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Unbanning the alt account doesn’t unban the main account:

This means if you are aware of an account that was banned in error due to a false alt account detection, you can simply unban that account and carry on as normal. Of course, this assumes that you know the account was banned in-error however the developer-supplied appeals process could be designed with this in mind. This doesn’t mean that IP sharing amongst households isn’t an issue as that is still quite relevant regardless of this API behaviour.

4 Likes

Hey, thank you for the response and the issue here is that manually unbanning accounts flagged as alternative accounts is alot of effort.

In PLS DONATE, we use a custom Admin Panel and any account banned by the API update is not displayed on our panel, we ban hundreds of people daily and we probably have over 10,000 banned profiles within the game.

I believe Roblox should expand the customization and introduce the aforementioned manual review process → If they want to keep it strictly accessible for Developers then they should give them an option to appoint Moderators that can access the manual moderation page.

2 Likes