I am a new developer and I am trying to make an experience that I think will be fun for users. I have been pretty careful to make sure I follow best practices and certainly stay within Roblox’s rules.
About 6 weeks ago, I was working on my game and when I published it to Roblox to my display my account was moderated as soon as I clicked the publish button. My account banned and $25k in Robux confiscated. I was horrified and out hundreds of dollars and hours of time. I was very alleviated when I was just guided through an automated process to re-enable my account and continue on my way.
The thing I was moderated for was have a “Twitter Handle” in my game and guiding users off-platform. The issue with that is, I have never had a twitter handle or anything related to social media in it. There were no assets in my game that weren’t made by me at that point, so I know there wasn’t one hiding anywhere. Since I have aspirations to hopefully be good enough one day to make a little bit of money via the DevEx program, I decided to appeal the moderation. I am not even sure the appeal was necessary, but I don’t/didn’t want to have any strikes against my account, especially if they are not accurate.
I have opened 3 tickets explaining the situation and requesting that a person look into the moderation action and remove it from my account record if there is such a thing. Like I said, I want to make sure I stay in good standing.
First, it takes 3 days minimum for support to even address my issue and they just state your account was moderated for… Please make sure you remove… It’s like they didn’t even read my ticket. If I respond to the ticket I never hear back from them again. I have followed up 8 times, and nothing.
I guess what I am needing help with is how do I deal with this? Should I even be dealing with it, since my account was restored almost immediately following the automated process? Does it matter or am I just wasting my time and energy. Is being wrongfully banned by a bot and having all your earnings and hard work confiscated just a part of what you have to deal with when you develop for the Roblox platform? Is there actually a way to get support to help you? Any guidance experienced devs can provide would be greatly appreciated. Thanks all.
There is a 5% chance that you will be unbanned, the moderation is complete garbage. Sorry but theres a large chance that you will not be unbanned due to the trash AI moderation. Contacting Support is also full of AI.
Yes, I kind of got that impression. Do they treat successful developers the same way? I would imagine that if you game is making them a lot of money you probably get to deal with people and don’t have to worry about auto-bans.
Unless you have a bunch of other developers/supporters that can also contact Roblox about this, or if you are popular on Youtube, you have the same chance as any other person.
For the large majority this is unfortunately a yes, however that doesn’t mean you should give up on appealing moderation decisions that you deem wrong, do keep fighting for that sweet resolution.
I have seen cases being resolved after 30-40 appeal attempts, absolutely crazy standard to be setting here by Roblox but hey man if that’s what it takes to guarantee a clean record then I would take it if I were you or anyone else.
Alternatively I do suggest spreading out funds to accounts you don’t use as much in order to avoid losing those funds from false moderation on the active accounts where there’s a higher chance of it happening, same thing with assets & game files, it might seem like a stretch but trust me oh boy does it save your #ss in the off-chance of stuff like this.
Also as already mentioned you should be totally fine for devex eligiblity, I don’t know if you’ve filed any Tipalti information out yet, but if you haven’t then they can’t even really possibly track you as non-eligible if you just go on a different account (up until you file that information) -just a hypothetical though
As for the appeals themselves I would suggest adding little hints at legal action in your emails or threats if they’re getting to that 30 sent appeals range, sounds a little radical but trust me it can work if you’re subtle enough, try to also send these appeals during US timezone workhours, lessens the chances of your appeal being viewed by some outsourced worker.
$25k is relatively big money we’re talking about here so I really would just try everything there is before settling on letting it go
Thank you for taking the time to draft such a thoughtful reply. I truly appreciate your advice and will continue to appeal and make sure I spread things out. I am still in early development stages and a while out from releasing a game that anyone would want to play and trying to do the DevEx stuff. If I am unable to successfully appeal I will probably take your advice and just publish under a new account. The $25K in Robux that was initially confiscated was in my account because I may have gotten a little bit addicted to Pet Simulator.
I thought it was a peculiar reason for a ban considering I had played multiple games that literally have signs in them telling people to follow their socials and join their discord or whatever. I don’t think any of them actually had handles included, but they are 100% “guiding people off platform.”
Look at stuff like this makes me very glad I’m just a hobbyist, and not a big-time developer.
Looking at all these, its sends a chilling effect. Reading all these horror stories around moderation and people dealing with appeals is very deflating and doesn’t encourage creativity.
Its starting to feel like, despite Roblox going public a few years ago, that moderation is still in many ways adapted to the conditions that existed when it first started out way back in 2006. Its not flexible at all and barely gives any wiggle room for context. To make it worse, moderation is mostly automated.
Has a single real human being actually read your appeals?
People fund their university tuitions developing on this site. Just the thought of losing your account at an arbitrary instant because of a rainy day at Roblox HQ cannot be good for one’s mental health, in conjunction with dealing with the kafkaesque labyrinth that’s Roblox Support.
A bot being the arbiter of having a major source of your income on the line… something about that sounds that it needs to be illegal. That’s like standing underneath a sword that’s held up only by a string.
That’s completely true honestly. It really just depends what the reason was and what you did
The truth is someone saying “gg” 5 times in a row and getting warned for spam is more unlikely to get it appealed than someone getting banned for harassment that did nothing
I am guessing roblox just rarely accept appeals because they basically got no info on bans like robux buying/selling or stuff like enforcement bans
But for stuff like basic wrongfully moderated images they would accept appeals. Appealing is definitely not operated by AI and you can tell by copy and paste errors, grammar mistakes, response times, etc
However, i can’t say that the Appeals Page is operated by AI or not but i can say that support definitely isn’t
No, not a single person so far as I can tell based on the responses I get from support. From the best I can tell the responses from support are automated as well.
I got banned for having a “twitter handle” in my game and “guiding people off platform.” The thing that worries me is that I did not have a twitter handle in my game (twitter doesn’t even exist anymore and hasn’t for a while). I didn’t even have anything related to social media in my game, nor do I ever plan to. I know there wasn’t a handle hidden anywhere, because at that stage of development there was not a single asset I didn’t make myself in Studio or Blender. I was doing the UI and I had created some image labels that were populated with the Roblox default placeholder image. I clicked publish and was immediately banned. I was able to go through the automated process to restore my account. My current appeal is more about getting the strike removed from my account since it wasn’t accurate. It just worries me a lot that I could follow all the rules and best practices and still lose everything I created or earned because of a poorly implemented AI moderator. I have requested multiple times that a person look into it, but nothing.
I’ve been dealing with nearly the same issue since 2019. I had a game with a few million visits, it sounds like it was much smaller than your game, but still not tiny or anything, and my account got terminated randomly. The appeals people did absolutely nothing, and I’ve sent in probably 60-70 appeals since then. You basically have to get lucky with the moderator you get. It seems like you will have better luck if you have friends on the inside or can make a big fuss about it through social media. Wishing you good luck. I hope you can get this resolved.