I had an idea for a game that would allow players to get items while not in game, by using PM’s to send notifications. However I am unsure if that is against the Terms of Service. Since it could be misconstrued as a PM Bot.
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Probably not because it could be used maliciously.
e.g. spamming someone until your game is visited
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Fair point. The concept was more honest, akin to farmville, or other tapper style games where, when you’re offline ,people can send you gifts in order to keep you invested.
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If the messages are truly rare I think it’d be cool. I don’t see anything in ToS that says no.
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Firstly, is this really possible?
And second, could this be a feature players could turn on/off? Because I think if you include the option to turn it on, or turn it off, it’d be much more appropriate for Roblox to allow it.
Could also be useful in big games that users could turn on like “get PMs” and the PMs would send out information about updates as they come out. Would be hella cool.
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Yes and yes. I’ve thought of doing this kind of thing too. Could also be used with Discord for better notifications because people likely have Discord running in the background most of the time, but I’m not sure how much Roblox would like that.
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I see no harm in having a bot account that sends messages from game requests to invite the players in for their gifts. That is of course, only if the messages do not count as:
- Scam
- Spam
- Inappropriate
- Anything else that would get a message moderated.
While it seems like a good idea, there are a few things to keep in mind. Just because I joined your game once does not mean I want to receive a thousand messages. That would cause me to report your bot and for your service to be temporarily broken.
What I’m trying to get to is the following:
-
Have the players agree to it in game
You should verify that the player wants to receive these messages. In settings, make sure to ask the player if they would mind enabling “offline gifts” or something -
Have the agreement expire
If I stop playing your game, chances are, I no longer want these messages. If the player doesn’t play your game in a chosen period of time (5 days, perhaps?), then they stop receiving messages. -
Have a limit to messages per day
I would recommend no more than 1 message per 1-3 days. You can strategically plan this according to how your game works. Maybe if they have not played in 24 hours, it sends them the message with a reminder of all their gifts, or something. You can have them choose the limit of different messages, though I don’t think it’s worth the work.
And finally, this only applies to sending messages via ROBLOX pms. Although possible, asking them for their discord, email, or anything personal is against roblox TOS. So yes, it is possible to send PMs on roblox, and as long as the messages don’t get moderated, would be allowed (or at least I would think).
The notification system of my choice would be discord, but that’s beyond forbidden on roblox for whatever reason.
Anyways that’s just my take on this, correct me if I said anything wrong 
.
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This should be an official feature, but developers can only send one message every 24 hours per player per game to prevent spam. Or maybe it can be in the Notifications but not in the messaging system itself, so that when it goes away, it goes away forever. That would help prevent spam and scammers more. I like this!
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It’s not really player-friendly to send private messages, nor are the private messages very versatile, and you have to deal with the fact that most players probably wouldn’t have their message settings open anyway since they have chat restrictions by parents / privacy settings they set themselves / need to follow to send message / etc. Also, you’d probably have to give them a way to opt out or you’re going to get negative responses from players that don’t want to be messaged about a game they don’t want to know about anymore.
Let’s not forget scalability issues (can only send X messages per account per minute as anti-spam measure right now, unless you have multiple bots running at which point it becomes real sketchy), the fact that moderation could accidentally/purposely take down your benign bot as collateral in the thousands of malign ones they deal with, having to quickly adapt your bot if the site API would happen to change / become more perceptive of who is a bot and who is not, etc.
It just doesn’t seem feasible, convenient nor future-proof to me. I wouldn’t do it. Consider writing a feature request for notifications instead. (As a new member, you can DM your draft feature request to @Post_Approval to have us approve it and post it for you)
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That’s a good idea. I’ll draft up a feature request and send it to someone.
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It would be really cool to be able to use Discord to send players notification, but Roblox has completely banned Discord, going as far as to filter the world itself, from the platform meaning it would be against the ToS.
Hopefully Roblox will allow Discord in the future as it can really be utilized to do some really cool things!
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Discord now has reporting to the Discord team. I really think they should sort something out with them because Discord is such a powerful tool.
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I get why they hate on Discord, since it has much looser content filters on text, and even goes as far as allowing NSFW content; with consent that you’re over 18.
I like it because it’s organized, live chat, live voice chat, and you post updates and give permissions for over people to post content in certain channels. Roblox groups only allow for shouts and a group wall. It’s just not powerful enough.
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Roblox really is going to need to loosen up on its developers and give them more powerful tools to use if they want to be able to get more professional developers onto the platform in the future.
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This actually brings up such a great idea for games. There could be a notification that you could turn on or off for each game. That way, developers could use this to notify players of something in-game such as like an pending upgrade or a new item.
However, there should be limits, of course. But it would add on to the “notification” feature 