Updates to the Roblox Terms of Use [January 2024]

Creators,

On February 15, we will update our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.

The goal of these changes is to be more transparent about our policies and ensure that safety remains the foundation of everything we do on the platform.

Here is a high-level summary of the changes, but please take some time to review and familiarize yourself with these updates.

The following will go into effect on February 15, 2024:

User Terms

  • Clarifying when transfers of Accounts are permitted. In Section 2c, we clarified a limited caveat to our general rule that you are not allowed to sell your Account or account credentials to another User, or purchase an Account or account credentials from another User. Transfers of Accounts are permitted in certain circumstances, however these circumstances do not permit the sale of Robux or Virtual Content outside the Services.

  • Outlining the rights related to moderation on Roblox. In Section 2f, we provided more information for users about how we enforce our community standards and clarified how we take swift action to quickly respond to any violating content or behavior on Roblox.

Creator Terms

  • Section 6 clarifies when we may moderate Experiences.

Appendix C (EU/European Economic Area and the United Kingdom)

  • Introducing the following sections in Appendix C:

    • Outlining Roblox’s repeated misuse policy for EU Illegal Content Notices and content moderation appeals.

    • Explaining recommendations and ranking of Virtual Content (defined as UGC and Roblox created content available for acquisition by Users on the Services).

    • For Users in France, we have information about mediation.

We wanted to highlight some extraordinary circumstances under which we might need to moderate experiences. Although it’s unlikely, if we find that a significant portion of users in an experience are violating terms in ways that our safety controls cannot detect, we may take action to ensure everyone’s safety. Example: Almost all of an experience’s users are using coded language in chat to coordinate violence in the real world over a sustained period of time.

Before taking any moderation action, we’ll contact the developer to help them reduce the abuse in their experience. The developer’s account won’t be affected, only the experience itself.

We are committed to giving you tools to help manage your experience’s community. As mentioned in our roadmap, we will be releasing an API to help you ban violating users and any of their alternate accounts from your experiences. This is expected to roll out in the next few months. We appreciate your feedback and partnership as we all work together in service of a safe and civil Roblox.

We strongly urge you to review the updated Terms of Use. As a reminder, if you are a minor, your parent/guardian will need to agree to the updated Terms of Use in order for you to continue using Roblox.

Thank you.

182 Likes

This topic was automatically opened after 10 minutes.

I think experience moderation is the most important thing here, also really like the API idea that helps us identify alternative accounts, overall great change to the ToS in my opinion

44 Likes

The ban API will be amazing, can’t wait for it.

50 Likes

wondering, how the ban API will work.

30 Likes

The link here appears to be broken. It just redirects to the help.roblox.com homepage

28 Likes

Is there any information or updates on how we can expect this ban api to work or look? Its extremely important that we have ways to disable this api alltogether for games who wish to not use it (instead of just not using it) to prevent abuse of this api ingame.

25 Likes

image

Glad to see this, hopefully this prevents future incidents such as the major Meepcity party problem from a few years ago.

37 Likes

I hope this feature is not using “Switch Accounts”, that was made for basically no reason.

28 Likes

Me too tbh but i think we’ll see a explanation maybe later idk?

19 Likes

My guess is that you won’t see a list of alternate accounts a user has, but instead banning a user with the :Ban() function will automatically make it so all their alternate accounts are banned as well. And it will obviously be server-side only.

22 Likes

ah crap, they added more rules im forced to follow

31 Likes

This is a great step up for Roblox communicating with us! Thank you for the detailed rundown of the changed terms and explanations for the rational so the community can be on the same page as you guys! We really appreciate this.

24 Likes

Thanks for more clarity on game discovery. It reiterated most things I’ve learned but in a more concrete way.

I wonder what “performance” in context means. I assume it means that games that crash often are put down more than those that do not crash as often. But, that “performance” could also mean how well the game is ‘performing’ in metrics like D1 Retention. Then again, it does state that the algorithm takes into account “experience content”, “popularity”, and “quality”. That last one can be subjective for sure.

I’ve updated My Research on the Roblox Algorithm & Discovery for Experiences/Games with this info.

As an aside, I’d love to be able to search by popularity myself to find more niche games. I know this is something David mentioned in a Tech Talk, semantic search by CCU or DAU. I don’t think semantic search is user friendly and the UX would be better if done via filters. The use of popularity as a metric for the algorithm makes sense for the majority. It reaffirms growth for what is already popular, giving a sense of stability that other games wouldn’t have. But, again, I’d like a way to find that niche content myself without semantic search.

I hope this message reaches someone as it can feel like I’m talking to a void, but I digress. Awesome changes, glad to see clarity.

15 Likes

“If we find an Experience in which a significant portion of Users are egregiously violating the Roblox Terms, Roblox reserves the right, in its sole discretion, to moderate the Experience if the developer does not take reasonable actions to limit the violative behavior.”

Good Lord above this has been a LONG time coming
although, i wonder if roblox will actually moderate the games or if its just another empty promise, time will tell.

I assume this is the alt account detection feature that was talked about before? personally, im not too keen on this feature, sure, it’ll stop hackers from joining games on an alt after being banned, but it’ll also stop people from playing games if they’ve been falsely banned, if their main account got terminated, etc. I feel like there is too many variables for this to work well, especially if this is the same system that will roll out for platform wide use.

"Roblox wants all Creators to develop their own ideas. Unless Creator has express written permission or a written license from the content creator to do so, Creator must not copy or make any modification to someone else’s item, content, or UGC and Publish it as Creator’s own content. "

this is pretty vague, how im understanding it is that any copyrighted content WILL be striked down if they don’t have a license, so that means games like blox fruits, TSB, and any other fan game or thing similar will be removed, similarly to what happened with the recent MHA game controversy; But i may just be reading too deep into this rule.

Despite all that, its good that roblox is making it clearer when they update the terms of use and rules, we love to see clarity from a company who’s services we use practically every day :saluting_face:

18 Likes

I assume the ban API is just something that’ll stop rule breakers from playing your game, there will obviously be more in depth use but its probably just a way to replace writing your own ban scripts.

about alt account detection, however; I have three theories.

  1. It detects based on IP address (horrible system but probably easy to implement)
  2. it uses HWID to detect alt accounts (easily spoofed but the safest option)
  3. it uses the switch accounts feature, like how @thedauser said. (easily bypassed by just using another browser :skull_and_crossbones:)

I personally believe the third option is most likely, considering how utterly useless the switch accounts feature is, and how it was only added quite recently; Possibly in preperation for this update.

11 Likes

Thanks for calling this to our attention. The link has been fixed.

17 Likes

Thank you for this update. Roblox is trully becoming a better place :slight_smile:

I will be using the Ban API!

15 Likes

Just dont use switch accounts feature

Log out and log into your alt. Log out of your alt and log into your main.

19 Likes

Look forward to the Ban API! Should be great for us. Will there be a system that can appeal these bans?

13 Likes