Hello Developers,

To better protect the community against inappropriate behavior, text filtering is now required for all in-game messaging. As many of you know, this has been an informal policy for quite some time. But to appropriately ensure the safety of the Roblox community, we need to formalize this policy and enforce it. We want Roblox to be a safe place where everyone can socialize and play.

Text filtering (previously known as chat filtering) will now be required for ALL text input in-game. For those unfamiliar with it, text filtering scans any user-input text for inappropriate or harmful language. This is not limited to foul language, but all communication that could be considered harmful or personal information. This applies to every instance of user-generated text in your game, not just chat. Pet names, signs, admin messages, or any user-created text stored in datastores are just some examples of user-generated text that must be text filtered. Note: You will most likely not see your own input text filtered locally. This can be very confusing, so I want to mention this system explicitly. However, ANY text input by a user that can be accessed in any other session or is ever viewed by another user will need to be filtered.

We’ve begun flagging games where user input text is not filtered. These games will be suspended until these issues can be fixed. But please note, there will be no permanent moderation action taken on your profile or your game based on this.

We are happy to help you make the modifications needed to comply with this policy change. Please take a look at the video below which discusses how to use text filtering. If you have any specific questions about how to do this in your game, please contact us at devrelations@roblox.com.

We are also actively working to improve our detection algorithms and we understand that some of these flags could be false positives. If you think you’ve been inappropriately flagged, please let us know and we’ll work with you to inspect your game.

We realize this requires work on your part to address – and we are grateful for that. We don’t succeed unless you succeed, but we all need to keep everyone in our community safe. We will be rolling out other policy changes in the future relating to filtering enabled (FE), specifically non-FilteringEnabled games will not be available to players under 13 years old. We will be following up with additional information on FE in a future post. We are actively working to make sure that implementing FilteringEnabled is easier and a clearly understood process.

We are hoping measures like text filtering and any future updates will help us build an increasingly engaging, safe, and fun community for all Robloxians.

– Developer Relations (2Blox2Quit, PenguinMikeDavis, and JParty)

Additional Helpful Links:

http://wiki.roblox.com/index.php?title=Text_Filtering