Major Updates to In-Game Reporting Tools

132 million daily active users come together with their friends, families, and other players from around the world to play on Roblox.¹ We work hard to create a positive, fun environment for every Roblox player and creator, and while the vast majority of players know the rules and respect the community, just like in the real world, not everyone plays by the rules. That’s why our moderation systems have many protective layers designed to catch the majority of inappropriate content and behavior before players ever see it. We also work around the clock to detect and remove anything that might make it through these protective layers. 

When an emerging trend, offensive new slang, or a new attempt to break our Community Standards does break through, player reports help us capture the metadata and context required to take swift action and train our moderation systems to detect the issue in the future. We’re rolling out major updates to our player reporting tools to make it easier for players to immediately report or block anything that makes them feel uncomfortable or unsafe. These updates include a simpler, more intuitive reporting flow and a streamlined process behind the scenes to make it easier for us to review and give feedback on reports.

A New, Intuitive Reporting Flow 

As Roblox has grown and added new features, reporting has become more complex. Players can report many types of interactions, from text and voice chat violations to offensive players or entire games. The average player may not know exactly which of our Community Standards is being violated, and they shouldn’t have to. We want players to be able to make quick yet accurate reporting decisions and get back to their game.  

To help simplify the process for players, we’ve redesigned our in-game reporting flow to automatically adapt the order of questions based on the type of report, skipping any irrelevant questions and making the reporting process much faster.

Every step of the reporting flow also incorporates plain language pulled from our Youth Guide to Community Standards, which were designed and tested in collaboration with our Teen Council. Using a simpler reporting flow and easier to understand language helps players confirm which rule is being broken and better understand our guidelines overall. 

Reinforcing Reports With Feedback and Tips 

It's not enough to silently take action on reports. We know how important it is for reporters to receive feedback on the outcome of their reports, and we've added per-report notifications whenever a report results in action. 

Feedback helps players see the system working and encourages high-quality reports that give us the data we need to take action. Today, we’re able to tell players when action was taken on their reports approximately 99% of the time.²

More Efficient Behind the Scenes

On the back end, the new reporting flow uses what’s called a flexible decision tree. Instead of sending every report to the same place, where they have to be sorted and sent to the right team for review, this new flow dynamically determines what type of issue a player is reporting and makes sure their reports are routed to the most appropriate team with the most relevant evidence right away. 

What’s Next?

These changes have been incredibly helpful as we work to respond to in-game reports and give feedback to players as quickly as possible. We’re doubling down on reporting feedback in Q3, adding a persistent inbox for players to review their submitted reports and learn more about the status of all their reports—both actioned and non-actioned.

Better reporting helps us improve our automated moderation systems over time to catch more issues before players ever experience them. As we continue to improve reporting, players should need to report less and less because our systems are catching the most common issues the vast majority of the time. Our ultimate goal is that these in-game reporting tools are available primarily to catch new and unusual issues on Roblox, which our system can then learn to detect.