Upcoming Changes to the GetFriendsOnline API

Updates Announcements
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Hi Creators,

We’ll soon be introducing controls that empower users to control who can see when they’re online or are in-experience and reflect our commitment to giving everyone on Roblox control of their privacy, especially the youngest players on the platform. We’ll be rolling out new privacy settings that let people on Roblox manage the visibility of their online and in-experience status. As a result, we’ll be making changes to the GetFriendsOnline API in the coming months as it’s dependent on what players select in these new settings.

Depending on their age, they’ll have access to a few different options for who they can share their online and in-game status with; these could include (1) everyone, (2) friends, followers and people I follow, (3) friends and people I follow, (4) friends, or (5) no one.

As a result, when GetFriendsOnline is called, the values returned will depend on the privacy settings of individual users. GetFriendsOnline will only return a friend of a player if you as the creator of the experience can view that friend’s online status, and if the friend either allows everyone on Roblox to view their online status or is in the same experience as the player. This setting’s default will be more restrictive for younger players, and we anticipate this change may impact experiences with a younger overall player base.

How does this impact me?

If you don’t currently use GetFriendsOnline or if your use cases for GetFriendsOnline API is limited to in-experience friends, this change will not affect you. However, we know that some experiences use this API frequently for invite/referral systems that allow players to invite their friends into the experience. Because of this new privacy setting, it will likely return an incomplete list of online friends that can be invited.

What can I do?

We recommend migrating any referral systems in your experience to PromptGameInvite which, when called, will display an invite prompt to the local player through which they may invite their friends to your experience. The friend list on the invite prompt prioritizes online friends and friends that the player frequently interacts with. Additionally, we recently launched the Friend Referral Program that allows you to provide rewards for players who invite their friends if the invite is accepted.

Here’s an example of the new referral functionality in use:

When PromptGameInvite is called, it will automatically bring up the ‘Invite Friends’ screen, without the player needing to click the Roblox logo and ‘Invite Friends’ submenu.

Players over the age of 13 who invite their friends will see the option to ‘share with people you know’ which will open the standard share options for the device they’re currently using. If the player is under 13, they’ll get a link which they can send to their friends to invite them to your experience.

When will this change happen?

We’re aiming to introduce the new privacy settings and make the associated changes to the GetFriendsOnline API sometime between June and August; as we get closer to the switch, we’ll update this post a few weeks beforehand as a reminder. Start migrating to PromptGameInvite now to ensure compatibility. Thank you!

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I like this feature. It adds more privacy for accounts under 13. I don’t think i’ve ever used GetFriendsOnline myself, but I’m glad to see Roblox working on privacy.

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Since we’re getting new friends settings and a rebrand, maybe we can see more features coming?

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Okay but please don’t rename “friends” to “connections”. It makes no sense and no one wants it since it will just overcomplicate everything

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This is good. But in light of the fact that you recently started hiding friends, followers, and followers of individuals in the UK, all accounts should also have the right to hide their friends and followers.

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“hey my connected… hermano” - how roblox wants people to speak

Yeah… well… quite an update

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I assume they renamed it to “Connections” so that friends will be visible to everyone and still comply to UK laws

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I use this to display which servers friends are in for a custom in-game server browser.
Is it correct that this won’t be affected since the users are within a place of the same experience?

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Yes, this change won’t impact friends in the same experience.

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Changes like these (of which numerous are affecting friend APIs), makes it such a headache to maintain friend list implementations in games.

I think it’s very unnecessary to prevent games from fetching information about a player’s online status, and that this should ONLY be limited to website/app functionality.

You’re giving developers very restricted access to information that’s needed to implement social features. Please reconsider.

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nothing tops the stupidness of “experiences” (they will always be games) but this is pretty high up on the “confusing rebrands made for zero reason” list if they go through with it

yes i know why “experiences” had to happen but that doesn’t make it a dumb word

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The experiences name change had a reason. It was because Epic Games was sad that Fortnite had to pay the apple store taxes because it’s a game but Roblox didn’t need to pay anything because Roblox is an “Experience” (Abundant of games) and Roblox just wanted to back up the apple store on that claim but 100% Roblox should change it back to games some day since experiences just don’t make the cut

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the issue imo is we have too many words. games… “experiences”… places… as an experienced developer having places and a game to contain said places makes sense but when i was younger it really confused me and im sure it confuses a lot of other people

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Just do what all game engines do. Games are games, sub-places are levels.

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so you turned an entire api into useless and unuseable to force on your new methods which continue to enforce a poor ui with little to none customization. the idea here is great, exectution not so much.

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When they release these changes.

Can we have something that is NOT a Package that contains all the autocomplete types for responses from methods that return things from the API?

Usually, there’s things like TeleportOptions and so on. But for certain “schemes” and etc. there aren’t any built-in types, or there haven’t been any lately. They’ve fallen off.

 

If there’s OpenAPI Docs, then automatic schemes and built-in types generation should be possible? :thinking:

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The corporatization of ROBLOX has led to games being called “Experiences”, players being called “people/visitors”, playing being called “visiting”, and now friends being called “connected/connections”. “My connected/connection is currently visiting an experience right now and cannot talk.” wHAT

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We are gradually working towards teaching the reflection system to more deeply understand Lua types beyond opaque “Array” / “Dictionary”. I don’t have an exact timeline but some of the pieces have already been put into place.

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Amazing to finally see more privacy for users.
Ideally, we can hide past usernames next.

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