Criticism of Roblox/Administration

MSE6

Main page: Community:MSE6

MSE6's Avatar

MSE6 is a former Roblox administrator from 2009 to the mid 2010s. She was heavily criticized by players on the Roblox Talk and Off Topic forums. She was often accused of abusing her moderation privileges, allegedly banning users for invalid, inappropriate, or outright false reasons and giving out inappropriate and harsh punishments. Although they presented little evidence for their allegations, many forumers believed MSE6 to be the sole administrator responsible for all inappropriate moderation on Roblox.

As of July 14, 2020, MSE6's account has been terminated for unknown reasons, despite not logging on since 2016.

In-Game Report System

Main article: Report Abuse

Roblox allows for a user, in-game, on the website, or otherwise connected to Roblox, to report another player's behavior to the admins. Using the report tool sends a message to the Roblox moderation team. The moderators then check the chat logs and other Roblox assets to determine what moderation actions are needed.

A Roblox safety tip telling users to report players who make them feel uncomfortable or are violating Roblox's rules

Multiple players have claimed that they have been punished for something they did not do or for something that does not break Roblox's rules. This has led many players to believe that Roblox's report system is primarily automated and designed to reprimand any user who is reported enough times. Players also believe that reports are rarely read by the moderation team because players are not instantly moderated as soon as a report is sent. It is also not very apparent if moderation action has been taken on someone's account unless they are terminated (where an error page will appear in place of their profile, and they will be grayed out when displayed on friend lists). Roblox has reassured players that reports are read, though it may be delayed due to the high volume of reports they receive at any time.

PewDiePie's Ban

Main page: Community:Pewdie123t32

On February 10, 2019, the YouTuber PewDiePie briefly returned to Roblox on an account called Pewdie123t32 and started a livestream known as "Playing ROBLOX! to stop Tseries (once and for ALL) ". The livestream was mainly Roblox gameplay. Game developers eventually caught on and changed their game title that would convince him to join, and the livestream soon reached #3 in the Gaming category according to YouTube Statistics. After an hour of streaming, his game and his account were terminated and the livestream was also stopped.

Around two months before the incident, the account "PewDiePie" was banned. About a month before the stream, Roblox Developers created a new rule stating that any mention about PewDiePie, whether uploading his face to decals or talking about him in communication areas, was against the rules.

Due to immense criticism and backlash by many Roblox community members, PewDiePie was unbanned on February 13, 2019. Despite this, however, Roblox moderation still views the phrase "pewdie" as negative and continues to warn users for mentioning it.^{⁠[citation needed]}

Code Reading

On March 19, 2020, Roblox made a post on the developer forum (found here) stating that they have been and will continue to read developers' code and administer warnings and account deletions for scripts that do not follow Roblox rules. This caused controversy within the development community, as Roblox did not formally ask for consent to read closed source code. Over 1,000 replies were made within the first four days of the post being public.

Termination for custom chat filter

During this debacle, a user by the name of ReverbAnnoucer received a termination for the usage of a custom filter on top of Roblox's chat filter. Roblox later edited the post saying that "adding additional safety for the sake of your players in the form of an extra chat filter will not get you punished." However, ReverbAnnoucer's account was never reinstated, and many developers believe that moderators will not take the time to check the usage of the script prior to moderating it.

Filtering System

Some of CommunitySift's advertised features

In early to mid-2014, many users were affected by an update that caused many words to be filtered. Roblox's filter system tags out inappropriate words with #, but in this instance, many appropriate words like "a", "my", "don't", "the", "well" and "yes" were flagged. Roblox uses CommunitySift, a context-based chat filter that utilizes a sliding scale risk tool for words and phrases. It is presumed that the filter after this update was set to a higher level that flagged content that it assumed was inappropriate.

Rules

Roblox's rules have been criticized for various reasons because community members call it "unfair." These reasons include but not limited to:

• No inappropriate places such as the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Nazis, the execution of the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, ISIS executions, or places containing adult content. They recently added pubs and bars to this list, but many places like Club Boates and Club Insanity still contain a bar.
• No discussion of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic or Teen Titans Go! in Off-Topic.
• No swear words
  • If you type a word that is filtered by the chat filter, it will appear as pound signs (#). This has not always been the case, however, as before pound signs were used, the whole message would just appear as [ Content Deleted ].
  • Some players may alter swear words, by either replacing certain characters with symbols or letters, removing certain characters, and adding new characters, just to bypass the filter.
  • Some words, such as "damn" and "hell", are not filtered, which allowed many users to get away with using the unfiltered words toward others.
  • Most filtered words are solely English ones, leading to some players swearing/cursing in a different language. However, this can be moderated.
• No Ugandan Knuckles, Big Chungus, or anything related to them.
• No depictions of romance, including shipping.
• No distorted or excessively loud audio. (testing to confirm if abuse filter triggers again)
• No images that include blurry, tiny, or unreadable text.
• No underwear-related clothing or "naked" avatars.
• No posting or mentioning about moderation actions..
• No Confederate flags or clothes with red armbands.

LGBTQP+

In 2018, Roblox began filtering terms used within the LGBTQP+ community, as they were often being used as derogatory terms. This caused criticism in the LGBTQP+ community. Later, many of the terms were removed from the filter, including words such as "gay", "lesbian", and "bisexual". However, there are still a few terms, including "nonbinary", "omnisexual", "asexual", "panromantic", and "queer", that are still filtered out.

Framing

During 2019-2020, many accounts that were 10-12 years old were deleted. During this time, a person could send an email to roblox.com/support and create a false report claiming that an old player's account had been compromised. This led to hundreds of old accounts being terminated.

This stems back to when parent accounts were still a feature on Roblox, in which users could pretend to be the parent of a victim's account and claim that fraudulent purchases were made on the account. This would often cause the account to become terminated from Roblox.