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Comment by keithnz | Hacker News Reader

My 8 year old son switched to Roblox from Minecraft a while back, he loves it, he spends a lot of time in RobloxStudio making his own mini games. All seems quite cool, just make sure you turn on all the parental/privacy controls, there is a high amount of interaction with random other players.

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I have to say that the parental controls are really strict, in particular the chat auto-moderation, to the point that any word or sentence that could be remotely considered inappropriate is censored. I suppose this is a good thing considering that most players are young kids.

Ah, interesting. That explains the Roblox memes I see from time to time with very odd grammar. "Go commit neck rope", "I will un-alive you", and "Do you are have stupid?"

When I read about companies implementing chat auto-moderation, I'm not sure whether to be disappointed at the utter pointlessness (coupled with invasiveness) of such exercise, or to applaud them for promoting kid creativity.

The companies probably understand that it doesn't really work, but they need to be able to show something. Parents won't accept "it's impossible" as an answer.

Which in turn makes me wonder, how home parents tend to forget being kids?

I have wondered about the same thing before. I think it's mostly an emotional reaction. Society in general seems to be really accommodating to parents when they have emotional reactions about their children.

Are you sure about that? http://habitatchronicles.com/2007/03/the-untold-history-of-t...

Reminds me tangentially of "will bobba for furni" https://v1.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/video-games/is...

If the account is for an under 13 child the chat supposedly uses a whitelist of approved words, vs. a blacklist for 13+. Having watched my son play it does seem likely that's the case.

That only works if the child hasn't yet figured out that all they need to do is create a new gmail account and get another Roblox account set up. Then they can do whatever they want.

Kids are smart these days, so we've taken the tact of having the PC in the common room and only allowed access if we're in there.

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