Roblox has recently decided to shadow-ban every game labeled a “social hangout” with no prior notice. This was likely done due to the recent announcement here as damage control.
Developers of these games are now told that they’ll need to redo the questionnaire and then file an appeal through Roblox support. Appeals generally take a LONG time to get handled, so Roblox is essentially telling developers that their games will be shadow-banned for a week+.
This has affected MANY regular social games. Hiding these experiences is only a temporary solution & fails to address the root issue.
Bad actors will simply find alternative games. Why not ban the bad actors off the platform and work with law enforcement so these people KNOW that their actions will have consequences?
A large number of inappropriate games don’t even use the social label and are unaffected by this shadow-ban wave.
The ban came with 0 notice and is generally unfair to many developers as they have done nothing wrong.
I do agree with banning inappropriate games like Bathroom Simulator, but there is no reason to ban regular social games like Mic Up & Neighbors. Funnily, there is a copy of Mic Up made by another user right now that is stealing players from the original here: Mic up - Roblox.
Agree with it. Roblox has thousands of moderators who can manually check every Social Hangout experience and draw conclusions, instead of banning all games and damaging good developers
I agree with this (although I know nothing will come of this request) most bad actors create experiences quickly that they know will be banned. Often they’d leave it unrated, but now that unrated games don’t show up anymore, they can just quickly sign the Maturity & Compliance questionnaire to have the game playable. Discord servers will still be able to distribute these problematic titles and players can still play them. If they weren’t following the rules anyway, this doesn’t solve anything.
I’m actually quite frustrated because now my ability as a genuine roblox developer is stunted because I’m now more restricted as to what I can include in social-like experiences. One of my games I’ve uploaded quite a few years ago that I marked as a Social Hangout for following Roblox’s rules back then is now shadow-banned and I can’t even receive emails from Roblox support to appeal because they don’t send any confirmation let alone a response.
Either improving the appeals system or incorporating some more leniency with the maturity label seems more reasonable. It makes more sense to limit only experiences that primarily take place in one location (like the experience has designed you to stay in a bathroom, or stay in a bedroom). With the current system, it appears ANY social experience that has at least one of these rooms are basically “banned” and locked to 17+, which is insane as 17+ is quite a minority on Roblox.
I can understand why they made these changes, and I think it works temporarily, but for the long term this just makes social hangouts as a game more worth avoiding, which begs the question why Roblox hasn’t just banned it as a genre if they’re under so much heat for them. That’s just my two cents, feel free to disagree.
Seconded. I’ve had to remove all bedroom-like things from my game despite the place not being One Of Those™ games. Like, just beds… walls surrounding them… Because apparently sleeping is an adult/private action, I guess.
It’s annoying. Our first appeal was denied despite my questionnaire being accurate. Now I have to wait another day or so to get my second one through.
My game is my primary source of income, and since I’m disabled I can’t really work outside my home. This has been a massive blow to an already rough month for me, but that aside.
Instead of addressing the root issues and you know, banning NSFW condo games, Roblox has made the worse decision of shadowbanning ALL social hangouts to manually review them like this isn’t a significantly more laborious thing to do and devastating to some devs.
This whole fiasco has been awful, and Roblox is treating it like it’s our fault.
Worst part is, this doesn’t actually stop bad actors at all. They can easily lie on the questionnaire and it would be incredibly expensive and time consuming for Roblox to manually vet each title that is released, let alone every content update that drops weekly.
Also it appears Unrated titles are still available to be played despite what Roblox has said. Even if they do fix this, the issue I presented earlier is still a problem.
If Roblox’s goal is to curb Predatory behaviour on the platform, this doesn’t solve anything. It’s still possible for Experiences that break the rules to stay up, and in the time limit they expect. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s why most inappropriate games that show up don’t bother signing the questionnaire, because they know it’ll just be banned.
We need a better solution than this. All it does is limit good-faith developers & discourages creating games that integrate social aspects as part of the core experience.
On the note of you saying your appeal was denied, I haven’t even gotten any email back from Roblox Support still. It’s like they’re not even receiving my support emails and despite releasing a bug report about it here there doesn’t seem to be any response, or anyone else who is suffering from this issue (unless the people that liked my replies are having the same issue too)
My game doesn’t have any beds, bathrooms, nightclubs and we even have the advanced moderation system and rules, but the support declined the appeal, what?
Oh my god it didn’t even occur to me that this update makes it objectively easier for condo makers to stay up for longer because people won’t find it unless they have the link to it (meaning content won’t get reported as soon)
(Funny how a change that only benefits rule breakers, most notably sex game creators, comes out right around the time Schlep gets cease and desisted)
It’s just like the hidden offsale content update all over again (when that came out it made it literally impossible to report pornographic decals because it literally hides the whole page as if it doesn’t exist)
So say, someone creates a throwaway account to publish an inappropriate game. Without a content maturity label, the game won’t be playable anymore (once this change rolls out). But they can’t even set a content maturity label until the account is 30 days old. Which means the only way around this would be to start stockpiling on alt accounts over 30 days in advance. So this actually does help somewhat.
30 days or not, this does more harm than it actually solves the root cause. It’s clear that even in popular experiences, Players wait out ban times only to come back and do what they did again. There is a lot of people associated in those kinds of communities so I wouldn’t doubt that 30 days is practically nothing to these people.
We need a more proper solution. It slows their activity, but this doesn’t actually solve what people were angry at; They were angry at inappropriate experiences (places made for the entire purpose of being romantic, doing inappropriate acts), not “banning” every social hangout as well as what developers can make within them.
This is where I feel Roblox missed the mark. Social Hangouts as a whole are not the problem, it’s the lack of moderation towards the minority of Experiences that misuse the label for bad.
Roblox can’t do this. It would displease the investors. Having a lower player count? Are you crazy!? And about the part with zero notice: In their perspective, the community pushed them with no notice too!
Roblox as a corporation has had a very efficient reaction time to this situation but ignored the fact that they need to notify developers and not make breaking changes. Ignoring developers is never good for platform-wide communication so I entirely support this feature request, however the changes that were made did not harm more than they helped.
cost money. Lots of money. Imagine $30 per hour times 1000 mods times 8 hours. That’s $240,000 per day. Per month, that’s over 7 million dollars. This damage control had to happen, but it shouldn’t have happened without ANY notice.
The good news is that all social hangout games are basically gone. That’s also the bad news, but that’s not what the lawyers think. It was a good decision considering the fact that the majority of social hangout games are used by players this way. This isn’t uncommon. These bad actors will go to other games, where YouTubers won’t pick them up and publicize Roblox for being a pedo platform. They don’t care. And those games that they used to play are social hangout games.
I’ve played a fair share of social hangout games in 2018, but then I stopped. I stopped because there were some random people trying to hook up with me, no joke. I didn’t even send a message in chat. This isn’t a new issue and has been happening for YEARS and this is the CLOSEST Roblox has ever come to completely decimating them. Can they go further? Yes, but not without sacrificing them. They are players, nonetheless. They generate revenue, especially from the Robux they buy to buy those t-shirt and shirt combos. Roblox is not lacking support. They have already defeated a chunk of this userbase and now they are dispersed into random games. The issue is more spread out now. It’s kind of like how you mop up a mess. It doesn’t really clean it that well, just kind of soaks it in a little and spreads it around the floor, right? That’s what Roblox did.
For a corporation as public as Roblox is, I’m personally impressed with them for acting this quickly. Of course, acting this quickly has caused some issues with their communications. They may have forgotten to tell the developer relations team that they are actually needed for once. It’s hard to operate a corporation as large as Roblox efficiently when none of the management can communicate with other management teams within the same day because their inboxes are full or they have to schedule several meetings.
Banning the bad actors off the platform isn't trivial, and Roblox doesn't want them to leave the platform as they are technically still 'players'.
Now, addressing the actual feature request. While I do agree that unshadow-banning the social hangout games would address the issue, it might not have the effect you’ve described. The bad actors would come back. “banning” them off the platform doesn’t work because there are literally thousands of them, each of them spreading their ideologies and learning how to evade bans by bypassing detections. It would also result in numerous false positives. For example, if you were to “ban” someone for leading them off-platform, congratulations. You just banned hundreds of thousands of genuine users who just want to talk to their friends outside of Roblox, and the reason why they want to talk to their friends outside of Roblox is because of the moderation. This is why “Trusted” connections exist. Roblox plans to make it so that you wouldn’t need to direct the users off-platform.
Roblox has instead taken control of the experiences because it is a LOT more practical. The only implication is that it impacts the developers. It was still wrong for them to give zero notice, but it's almost impossible to coordinate a large corporation this quickly. This is mostly, however, the fault of the law, and not Roblox.
So, practically, you can’t just “ban” them. And then again, “banning” them doesn’t ban them. They can just make a new account. This is why Roblox’s solution leverages off of the experience developers, not the players. They can control the experiences with ease while the players always bypass the detections and make alts. You can blame the laws, not Roblox, if this becomes an issue. I prefer to educate children instead of just “cover up” the predators that exist everywhere on the internet. It is a form of censorship in itself, though with good intent.
I was wondering why my game was error 404.. it’s not even a classic ‘vibe game’ it’s literally a huge open space.. I dislike the handling of a wipe every developer’s game out instantly within one genre.
