Voice chat moderation : Moderation reason needs to be given when banned from voice chat

The Roblox Conspiracy that I believe. People are definetly abusing reporting one way or another.

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This is the reason why I aren’t getting it.

If ROBLOX wants to be a “centre of all communication” (which I heavily doubt will become a reality) they NEED to sort this out!

Here are a few ideas I have.

  • The AI could be used to notify a HUMAN moderator to check on the conversation. If it is a violation, then moderation action takes place. But never, ever should the AI be working alone.

  • The recording should be provided in the ban message so that it can be used to back up the ban. If it is clearly false, then it should be easily appealable (unfortunately, the appeal form is literally impossible to use now with the new captcha they added)
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  • This trend of radio silence ROBLOX has been taking NEEDS TO STOP. This has been frustrating as the ‘community’ which is supposed to be cared about cannot confirm whether they’re being listened to or not. Copy-paste statements that are readable elsewhere do not clarify anything. And being the victim of a recent false VC-ban, I recommend turning off spatial voice altogether, and not using ROBLOX as a space for communication. These are glaring issues and nobody knows whether a solution is on the way or not.

It’s sad to see that this thread was made earlier this year, and the problem has not changed in the slightest. I feel that nobody in the community is being heard, which is straight up toxic.

AI is not ready to moderate our speech, and it will never be able to. This is a job that only HUMANS can do. Abuse is often more than just saying swear words (and, in my experience, actual harassment never gets dealt with, despite sending several reports). This is like if you would get a strike on your account every time you got your text chat messages hashtagged.

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I wanted to revisit this as I remembered it existed. There’s a wave of new issues continuing after their remade moderation steps system (warnings, timeouts, bans, etc). I’m also aware that this was an issue before but it seems to have worsened.

Many times when I’m visiting Mic Up (17+ version), frequently do I see multiple players at once freaking out over getting their VC suspended. I’m unsure if this relates to one sad soul going around and mass reporting for anything they can reach for or if the servers are “poisoned” as I’ve started coining to my friends so they can rejoin quickly. Leaving and rejoining to clear the cache seems to help temporarily but there’s been a few times where I’ve still gotten timed out for 20 mins. I wanted to know if anyone else has either experienced this or witnessed this in any of your servers regardless of the age gate.

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I too have concerns over the current method of how Roblox handles voice chat moderation. I cannot attest to all methods of how it is handled, but I can attest the primary first line of defense is 100% through newer “artificial intelligence” methods specifically trained and designed to pick up various ques Roblox deems is in violation of their Community Guidelines.

I got my first VC ban yesterday talking about a particular alcoholic drink on a 17+ experience which artificial neurons would easily interpret me as “name calling with explicits” to someone, but it was a mere discussion about weirdly named drinks. The ban was near immediate, no more than 5 seconds, and unless several people have a macro for quickly reporting I do not believe I was user reported.

I understand the shear amount of total “active” (active being registered individuals who continuously log into Roblox at least once a week and engage for at least 1 hour) users of the platform would overwhelm even the largest most well funded moderation team the world would have to offer, but the fact is we don’t even have that. I’ve been a member of Roblox for 15+ years, I’ve seen it grow, and I know for a fact attempting to properly tackle moderation on this scale is nearly impossible even if you outsourced the entire team to China/India.

Possible Solution

Personally, I am okay with and understanding with continously trained artificial neurons being the first line of defense for moderation, as long as Roblox would:

  • Actively acknowledge it is being used and they are aware it is not perfect.
  • Would hire a well trained and funded team who is capable of spending more than 5 seconds quick-reading through cases and actually take a moment to interpret the situation + apply company policies.
  • Establish some sort of “account standing” credits/ranking where those who are in good standing and haven’t had serious run-ins with the moderation team have better ways to escalate their cases to this team to assist with training this first-line artificial intelligence.

There are ways to tackle this that are better than what is currently offered. The very first at absolute minimal step is transparency this is being handled by AI. Roblox as a corporation may not admit it, but I can attest it is being used based off hints from previous Press Releases and Job Postings.

EDIT:

Just got a day ban for harassment. I have no clue what they’re even talking about :sob:

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So discovered something interesting today. Got suspended yet again with no “it could have been this” reason whatsoever. Upon looking into the voice API, Roblox does appear to have some sort of reason listed, but in numerical form:
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So for anyone who comes across this thread with a ban, I implore you to take a screenshot/note what banReason number you get along with what you suspect the ban is. I am curious if we can find some patterns along with the banReason number to determine why we’re getting banned.

At some point, whether I find enough information or gather enough feedback, I’ll create a separate thread pooling all of this information together to keep it more concise.

EDIT:

Made a thread to track this.

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banReason 0 means not banned btw

Not necessarily, a different boolean value is provided which determines if a user is banned or not.

im not banned it says and i have banReason 0

Voice Chat really does seem, to me, to be a strange perplexing feature for the ROBLOX environment.
Even though people have wanted something like Voice Chat, but because of Roblox’s Moderation practices there’s an incentive to stay away from it rather than use it.

People, out of habit, just say stuff off-the-cuff, entirely different from actually typing something out. Because of Roblox’s moderation you have to super vigilant of whatever unconscious utterances you make.

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Is this still a big issue? I won’t be using voice chat in popular games until this is fixed.

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Yes, this still seems to be a big issue.

I think they are trying to improve the moderation, however. Today I got my first VC suspension (reason 6) even though I was not saying anything that would break guidelines (in context to the game I was in).

About 5 minutes into the suspension, however, it managed to get lifted. I’m not entirely sure why, but it seems they are making strides to fix VC moderation, or I was just a lucky case.

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Auto-moderation for assets is dumb/annoying, I was on a business account scrolling through toolbox models and i put in a model that had inappropriate models inside and it instantly got the whole account perm banned. It was a 10 year old account and everytime I emailed Roblox they said we cant do anything which is unfortunate.
(I know this isn’t the place to discuss this but that message peaked my interest in asset auto moderation)

Also I would like to add to this that yes, moderation does need to have reasons for bans and the exact quote on some of them on what may have been perceived else players may just say it again without knowing what exactly they said was wrong.

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i was doing games for the hunt and then i got banned while being afk. my mic was muted both irl and in roblox, yet i got banned. i really hope they can rework bans for voice chat because i have gotten banned for stupid reasons several times within these past few months

for a follow up, my account was appealed. i have no clue why i got banned in the first place but at least it was appealed 20 hours later :smiley:

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I got banned for an unfair reason (harassment) after reporting a user for being underage, tried to appeal, and got this incredibly long and stupid captcha, at this point, there’s an admin targeting me or something because in no way did I deserve the ban here.
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EDIT: after solving it I got “ERROR, SOMETHING WENT WRONG, PLEASE TRY AGAIN” and a harder captcha TWICE
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got one wrong and had to redo all of them with the number increased
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edit 2: I CANT APPEAL IT AT ALL I KEEP GETTING THE ERROR

edit 3:

I ended up manually emailing Roblox and telling them that I essentially got an unappealable ban for something that I did not do, but I didn’t even get a response.

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that is insane. i wish roblox would improve their support handling

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This is insane. My microphone was muted in-game (or at least it said it was muted) and I was talking over Discord. I cussed IN A DISCORD CALL while team-testing and got warned. Am I going to have to start blocking Roblox and Roblox Studio’s access to my mic out of fear that it’ll pick up something I’m saying in a completely different context?

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I actually had my VC Suspended only once. Because I didn’t want for any offenses to pile up on me I appealled it. I have no clue what I have done to get Suspended as I don’t swear or use strong language to others. Seeing this was may of last year, it is surprising to see that this feature has not been included yet.

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Man how do you get your VC suspended in ROBLOX STUDIO. Even with the microphone muted they still shouldn’t be able to use that against you.

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I got the same suspension for 1 day and i just talked with my friends and nothing inappropriate, but some mad players reported me and i got the suspension, it’s terrible system

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