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Comment by foota | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting to me to think about a possible system where people in say roblox can only chat with each other by exchanging physical keys somehow. This way, they would be able to chat with their peers from school etc., without the danger or need for as much supervision.

I don't necessarily think this is technologically feasible or something that would be accepted, but I think it's an interesting idea.

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Isn’t this just called “having a discord server” or even a group text? If you only want to talk with people you know outside the game, you don’t need the game to facilitate that.

most of the Roblox predation is occurring on Discord, so not a solution

(and actually explains why the CEO this article is about feels like its not his problem, because as long as people keep pointing fingers in the wrong direction for our legal system, then the CEO and Roblox corporation will be impervious and their efforts seen as sufficient)

That means your kid has joined a random person's Discord server without your knowledge.

This would be trivial to implement well. Give the parents a console where they can paste in usernames. Most classes already have parents whatsapp groups or similar, so it’s easy enough to broadcast the usernames, or create a shared google doc.

Console access could also be required to create new accounts. The article says it is currently trivial for kids to just create an adult account and bypass all the parental controls.

I don't think it's a terrible idea. You could make the keys some sort of amiibo-like NFC device or trading card.

There is probably some way you could toy-ify it and sell a lot of units

Parents have whatsapp groups for their kid's classes? That's news to me. When did that become the norm?

I saw it become a thing more than a decade ago

Nintendo kind of tried that with "friend codes" but they were just annoying and spread online anyway, which is kind of fair since today it's not uncommon for people to be friends with people in distant places and the internet should allow us to be able to connect and play with each other no matter where we are.

The original solution to just playing with local friends was LAN parties, but private servers were great too where they were actually private/hosted entirely by the players and not just part of some corporation's online platform.

Fwiw this is why I was thinking of a hardware solution, with some sort of hardware code shared via Bluetooth you could make it so it can't be shared online.

It doesn't even have to be super cryptographically secured against someone getting their own code off of it, since that's probably beyond most children.

You would want to make sure that people can't just sniff them or something though.

I think it's very technically possible with a lil bit of cooperation from industry: Private servers that use school creds to login. Now:

* kids play with other kids with same school, worst that can happen is learning some fun words from upper classmate * both teacher and parents can join and play or keep an eye on them * with a bit more it could be segregated to per class /grade server too

They could sell custom ubikeys/whatever. Kids love Tonies. A custom USB stick/NFC/air tag would be "easy" and profitable.

NFC tags in custom "avatars" unique to and customizable by each kid, turning friends into collectables? I would've been all over that in my early teens.

That’s pretty much the antithesis of online gaming. You’re not ONLY playing with other kids you know.

Edit: There’s two problems that need to be solved. Parents need to not offload all their responsibilities to a multibillion dollar corporation and hope it works 100% of the time. And corporations need to prioritize safety more than they do now. It dumbfounds me how many times I get called the N word on Xbox and nothing happens after I report it. It’s almost 2026, it’s not that hard people.

What important aspects of gameplay are destroyed by age-restricting DMs?

hell, the argument that it's needed to allow users to collaborate is dumb. Just have a list of specified phrases and severely limit other forms of communications, we figured this out with club penguin people it's not that hard

Parent doesn’t talk about age restrictions on DMs and nor do I. We are talking about physical keys and only being restricted to peers that you’d know from school for online play.

I'd say TFA and thread are both talking about this. Quoting the article-

> Understanding how attractive Roblox would be to predators, the company long ago could have blocked unrestricted contact between adults and minors.

Contact here seems to be about DMs or equivalent, since I don't think grooming and kidnapping preparations are happening in public forums? So with or without involvement of a physical key-exchange, I'd say that curbing private personal contact is the crux, and it's easily doable without effecting other aspects of the game

> Parents need to not offload all their responsibilities to a multibillion dollar corporation and hope it works 100% of the time

Hard habit to kill given that so many also offload many of the responsibilities to schools

> That’s pretty much the antithesis of online gaming. You’re not ONLY playing with other kids you know.

That's how online gaming looked for us back then, played in school over LAN or in local small town's "ISP" (which was just a bunch of ethernet cables strung together between apartment blocks).

It was fucking great.

And if choice (with parents not wanting to risk wider internet) is "play with your classmates/grade" and "don't play", it's far better option

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