The icon used for Experimental Mode on the Develop section of the site.
Experimental Mode was a label placed on experiences that did not have server replication filtering (also known as FilteringEnabled, or simply FE) enabled. This label was to warn players that the experience was less secure than experiences that were not in experiemental mode. To remove the badge, developers had to turn on the FilteringEnabled property in the experience's 
Workspace.
History[]
On July 19, 2017, it was announced that from August 10th, FilteringEnabled will be renamed to Experimental Mode, and Experiemental Mode experiences would gradually become hidden from the games page to users under 13. Experimental Mode experiences would also become deprioritized in search.[1]
On June 26th 2018, it was announced that new experiences would default to having the FilteringEnabled property enabled, would not appear in the games page for users over 13, and most controversially, that experiences in Experimental Mode would only be playable if the user was over 13, and friends with the developer of the experience. This feature was implemented a month later in late July 2018.[2][3]
Less than a week later, on July 25th 2018, Roblox announced the removal of Experimental Mode, meaning that all experiences that did not have the FilteringEnabled property enabled would be treated as if it was enabled, once again opening these experiences to users who were under 13 or was not friends with the developer.[4]
Finally, on June 1st 2021, the FilteringEnabled property was completely deprecated, resulting it being hidden from the properties widget in Roblox Studio, and that it would always return true when read from the Lua API.[5] (before this change, the FilteringEnabled property could still be toggled on/off, even though it had no effect outside of custom Lua scripts).
Criticism[]
Users primarily criticized the changes because experiences that had not been updated to work without client-server replication were, at first, completely unplayable to many players and later playable but majorly broken. Developers criticized the changes as updating their experiences would require major code changes, or complete rewrites to be compatible without client-server replication.
Roblox justified these changes by focusing on how having client-server replication filtering disabled was a major security flaw, which lead to criticism from mainstream media outlets about users seeing inappropriate content inserted into experiences without client-server replication filtering, and that client-server replication filtering is standard across most games, websites, apps and services.
Gallery[]
References[]
- ↑ JParty (2017, July 19). "The Future of Filtering Enabled: Experimental Mode". From DevForum. Archived from the original on October 23, 2023.
- ↑ Firecait (2018, June 26). "Changes to Experimental Mode games: now hidden from sort". From DevForum. Archived from the original on October 23, 2023.
- ↑ KnightGaladeld (2018, July 20). "Further Changes to Playing Ability of Experimental Mode Games". From DevForum. Archived from the original on October 23, 2023.
- ↑ KnightGaladeld (2018, July 25). "Removal of Experimental Mode". From DevForum. Archived from the original on October 23, 2023.
- ↑ Subcritical_alt (2021, May 4). "FilteringEnabled Property is Being Deprecated". From DevForum. Archived from the original on October 23, 2023.