As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to upload clothing assets without having a bot copy it thousands… and thousands… of times, here, let me show you!
So as you can see here, this is one of the items I have created. And as I said, it’s been copied thousands of times… There is 9,000 pages of just this ONE item, copied by bots. Just so you know, the bots don’t change the name, or change the template. So, it should be pretty easy to detect. I know that there’s no way to undo this, but by using CAPTCHA, we can prevent bots from further damage.
I noticed Roblox integrated the CAPTCHA feature before you join a group, to prevent bots from joining groups, so why not roll out this feature for whenever you upload an asset such as pants or a decal.
If Roblox is able to address this, it would improve not only my development experience, but every other developer that has to upload an asset. The catalog wouldn’t be flooded with copied clothing and copiers would feel less motivated to steal and to copy because they wouldn’t have someone (or something) to do it for them. Original content creators can have their work shown off more, and players can be purchasing original content that was not stolen and sold for 10 times the original price.
Please no. It is already painful/slow enough to have to upload assets one at a time to a website, the last thing I want to do is to solve 6 CAPTCHAs just to upload a skybox.
If you are having a hard time uploading multiple assets to the website at one time you can consider downloading this Google Chrome plug-in that let’s you upload everything at once.
That would break because it just uses the single-image API multiple times. You would have to solve a captcha for each image you uploaded.
Sorry, we won’t be adding a captcha to uploading assets. They’re a huge inconvenience to legitimate users, and like with all captchas suggested, they’re a naive solution and wouldn’t solve the problem (clothing copying). Clothing copying is a problem regardless of whether copies are uploaded by bots or not.
I see, I’m not fond of how CAPTCHA works, but if you have the plug-in I listed above, I would only suppose it would ask once, but maybe the CAPTCHA should only roll out once when you upload more than 5-10 items within 10 minutes or so. It probably isn’t possible, but I believe there should still be action taken against the bots.
edit: I joined a group today and noticed it didn’t prompt me to CAPTCHA, but, CAPTCHA regardless is always a disadvantage to legitimate users. I think it prompts it when it finds you “suspicious” or so, I’m not sure, I’m not one to actually say.
Adding on, it is actually rather difficult to find ID’s for clothing nowadays. I don’t know if it’s the bot that searches for the ID or if some program, but if someone was attemping to copy an outfit, it would take quite a while to find the actual ID. Unlike back in the day, you just had to subtract one number and then you can find it. Now you have to keep subtracting and sometimes it will take you to a game so you would have to go back and subtract more and just a lot more effort. Lastly, I haven’t heard much of someone manually copying, I guess you can say it sorta fell out of trend. You need a bot nowadays.
Flood checking won’t work because bots already change their IP to get around this. ROBLOX has floodcheck on signup and comments, but we still have bots.
If it were that easy it would have been fixed already.
You only need a bot to download the asset. You don’t need a bot to upload it. I’ve had to download a few of my own assets this way because I deleted the local file, and I uploaded them manually when I finished making whatever changes I needed to.
I know this is a serious problem for you, but if it were easy to solve it would have been solved already. Captchas are a solution for the desperate looking for anything they can get, but unfortunately they do not work. This problem is not going to go away because you want it to – we need to develop a proper solution, and this is going to take time. Again, sorry, but we won’t be implementing captchas on upload.
Never knew you needed a bot to upload it. It doesn’t explain why I can find thousands of pages of just one single item copied. I’ve had to re-download some of my old assets too, and it was extremely painful lol.
It doesn’t have to be a problem just including me, but rather everyone who might find themselves seeing their assets stolen. It surely isn’t an easy solution, but insisting the system to be used throughout uploading assets might or might not stop bots, I’m not sure, but hey, it’s worth a shot. The amount of people joining groups is a larger number of people uploading stuff, so, not sure if having that for clothes would be annoying as having it for groups. I just felt as if like CAPTCHA was going to be used for one feature on the website, why not integrate it on the other side of the website were bots reside. You know? Of course even if CAPTCHA is used, it would resolve much, but surely it would make us a step closer, even if it’s a teeeeenny bit. Hopefully a great solution is created one day. thanks for informing me
No, it’s not. “Why don’t we give it a chance?” is like a broken record at this point. That’s not how businesses work. When you have millions of users to scale to, you can’t take a guess at whether something will work, or spend all your resources chasing solutions that might work. You do it right the first time.
Teeeeeeeny bit solutions will not help. A 5% decrease in the amount of clothing uploaded doesn’t change the remaining volume from still being an insane amount. We’re not going to litter the site with captchas every time someone thinks they might help – stop requesting them. ROBLOX’s upcoming UGC will more than likely address clothing copying.
“No, it’s not. “Why don’t we give it a chance?” is like a broken record at this point. That’s not how businesses work. When you have millions of users to scale to, you can’t take a guess at whether something will work, or spend all your resources chasing solutions that might work. You do it right the first time.”
Well it’s working for groups… Why won’t it work for clothing? Like I said, the amount of people joining groups is a larger number of people uploading stuff.
“A 5% decrease in the amount of clothing uploaded doesn’t change the remaining volume from still being an insane amount”
Roblox adding CAPTCHA to groups didn’t change the fact there are still botted members in groups, but yet the feature is still here.
Roblox isn’t going to take action on the clothing that’s already copied. I already said that, but what they can do is work on stopping bots from continuing to flood the catalog. They already stopped bots from joining groups > they can stop bots from mass uploading clothing.
“ROBLOX’s upcoming UGC will more than likely address clothing copying.”
Depending on how UGC will work, people will only re-upload other people’s hats and etc just like clothes. But hoping for the best!
The solution here is stricter rate limiting which requires captcha once too many assets are uploaded in a certain amount of time.
This situation is different and has nothing to do with IP addresses. You are forgetting the biggest real rate limit of all relating to clothing uploading: builders club. Any amount of captcha, IP checking, and proxy blocking will never amount to the biggest blocker which is simply money. If you have to pay you will not be able to make that many bots. If you can’t make many bots and rate limit on an account-by-account basis, bots can be effectively stopped.
Of course a human can upload the assets, the question is whether or not they will. If bots were effectively stopped the reality is that they would not. The reason copying is profitable is because the entire catalog becomes flood with duplicates of every single shirt on the market. If bots aren’t uploading shirts every minute of every day it suddenly becomes worthless. Also, a human would be just as susceptible to being rate limited.
This is not an argument at all. No demonstration of ROBLOX’s effort has been made and as detailed in this post there are a lot more steps that could have been taken.
This should be even easier to deal with than forum and message spam because in this case it is ridiculously easy to differentiate between a bot and human. Again, these bots have to be uploading a lot to be effective. The rate limiting, set high enough, will not affect real users at all but bots will be detected easily. A normal user does not have to upload 5000 shirts a day or 35000 shirts a week, the type of volume copy bots rely on.
Anything to stem the flow of cloned items is greatly appreciated. However, as @paul2448 mentioned, this may not be the best idea for decals, models or audio, and should probably be limited to clothing and accessories.
I Support this, or maybe charging users 10(x-1) Robux to upload clothing, x being the amount of clothing uploaded per day. Also many of the stolen bot clothes are on deleted accounts/groups and should be cleaned out.
Then bots will download all the clothes they want to re-upload and batch upload at once.
“Never charge developers” -David B.
Good point. We might run into issues where a legitimate clothing creator is terminated for unrelated reasons, hiding a lot of legitimate clothing from the catalog, but terminated users will eventually lose BC so the items are going to disappear from the catalog anyway. This seems to be in-line with Roblox’s attempts to make the site safer by removing terminated users from the site completely (e.g. group member lists, friend lists, etc).
The problem isn’t bypassing reCaptcha, but instead malicious users avoiding Roblox giving it to them in the first place. If we enforce a captcha for each asset uploaded, disallowing multiple uploads at once, legitimate users become noticeably inconvenienced as mentioned earlier. It would seem we have to allow multiple uploads, but if we allow multiple uploads, malicious users will just upload all of their items at once, bypassing the captcha because it’s only technically one upload.
We could have some arbitrary limit such as 10 assets for multiple uploads, but legitimate users would still go over that cap in some cases and even allowing 10-asset batch uploads defeats the purpose of a captcha. If I want to upload 100 copied clothing, all I need to do is schedule my bot to upload them and then solve 10 captchas for it.
Captchas turn out to be an ugly/ineffective solution because captchas aren’t meant to be a copy-paste everywhere on the site solution. The appropriate solution is to hide “bad” items from search results – this not only solves future problems, but retroactively addresses the problem for existing assets.
thanks for informing me