According to some developers and confirmed by Roblox staff themselves, some plugin creators have been banned. According to many, plugin creators, following many requests for termination of bots creating fake or misleading plugins. This was not a surprise to many; it was predicted, for bots have been plaguing Roblox since their existence. Their duplicates of products are already seen in the catalog—if you were to search for a piece of clothing in the catalog, you would find numerous copies of the same product with the same name and description. Perhaps the most infamous bot copying plugins is "Plugin_Creator".
Recently, Roblox developers have been noticing infinite amounts of duplicate plugins. Heaps of plugins were made over and over again by the bot, causing confusion and frustration amongst developers looking for a legitimate plugin to use. Plugins are add-ons developers use for various tasks, typically to make doing things easier or to bring new features to their Roblox Studio program; however, similar to free models, plugins can carry malicious code, otherwise known as viruses, which mess with games. Common symptoms include random effects and deletion of assets; therefore, plugins should be taken only from trustworthy sources. Obviously, bots are not trusted accounts, so it should be presumed some of these duplicates are not true clones and may contain infectious code.
Not only do these numerous accounts creating duplicates and malicious code cause technical problems, but they also introduce a problem originally considered a nuisance of the catalog—searching. Developers can no longer easily find what they are looking for; instead, they must scavenge through a mess caused by bots. When they search for something, they are looking for a needle in the haystack. Many developers become unmotivated. They gave up looking and stopped creating features which they otherwise would have made. This problem stopped the innovation of developing for some time. The culprit behind "Plugin_Creator" is unknown, thought the bot account is now terminated.
The incident, said "Lilly_S" on February fourth, a member of the Developer Relations team, was not caused by a "rogue staff member or automated system". If the automated system or a staff member didn't do this deliberately, who—or what—did? The answer was given on February sixteenth, the day before this post. According to "Nightgaladeld", Roblox the problem was caused by the waves of demands for more action to be taken. One can infer this means moderators were rushing to delete and punish accounts which used bots to make malicious plugins; in this race to cure the plague, they killed off some innocent accounts as well.
Some members of the community speculate this "accident" was planned since the bot arrived to copy plugins. The question proposed is whether or not the Roblox staff team decided to make this error on purpose. Why? It could be their way of saying, "You pester us, you get this.", "this" being mainly the groups having authority and owner issues and innocents being banned. They speculate that they didn't take action against "Plugin_Creator" quicker than they did for this reason (even though this violated the ToS). However, this hypothesis is unlikely, for Roblox is an official company and would likely be punished for carrying out such actions.
What do you think? Has Roblox dealt with this well (or at least in a justified manner), or could they have done it in a better way, and what way is this? Is the conspiracy true, or is it all just useless drama? The problems caused by this—mainly tearing apart groups and the banning of innocent accounts (presumably developers)—have made a massive impact on the community and shows that Roblox's security system is not perfect, a popular but false belief amongst some. So, what's your conclusion? What do you make of this, and what does it show about the system and moderation?
