My History with ROBLOX

• 8 November, 2025
• ROBLOX
• NSFW

Small disclaimer: this journal was heavily inspired by toastedcherrie's own video, ROBLOX Shaped My Childhood and I Hate It, so please consider checking that out before this journal!

ROBLOX was a huge part of my childhood. I have many fond memories of the platform, creating games, making friends, and understanding myself. It introduced me to many, many concepts that I would still hold dear to my heart to this day, like roleplaying. There's also an abundance of games on there that give me the blissful feeling of walking into the middle of a bustling amusement park and joining in with the visitors's fun.

Unfortunately, that feeling is long gone. I hold very, very mixed feelings on ROBLOX as a platform now. These feelings, I can pinpoint an exact year when they began to sprout and take hold.

My History

My history with ROBLOX spans back before the day I created my account, before September 25th, 2025. I wanted to create video games, and at that time there was little freedom and t ools to do that. I often searched "how to make a game" in Google, and that's actually how I landed on Scratch. However, my mind shifted to wanting to make 3D games. I think either through this Google search, or through an ad, did I find ROBLOX. I used to play on the Windows XP I had at home as a Guest, one of ROBLOX's old deprecated features. This allowed players to try out ROBLOX before comitting to creating an account. After playing as a Guest for months, I realized I did want an account on the site.

I played on ROBLOX for a short time before taking a break and returning to Scratch. I skipped 2011, which was the year that held one of ROBLOX's worst security breaches. Long story short, a few kids learned that you can log into an admin account on the site by creating an account on the game's test site with the same username of a real admin. By taking that test site cookie and applying it to the real site, it basically allowed them to control the site as a real admin. This led to a lot of chaos, and admittedly it's something I wish I was there for. There's a lot of videos documenting the history of this event, so for more detail, check those out. I returned to ROBLOX in 2012, and caught up with a lot of new features. Voxel terraon was one of them, alongside the iconic Stamper tool. This provided an alternate method of building in ROBLOX. The primary way was through ROBLOX Studio, which for many users on the site (especially children), it was hard to get into. The existing documentation for ROBLOX was also poor, which made it hard to understand ROBLOX Lua, the platform's programming language. However, this never stopped me from trying to understand how to program. I understood Scratch programming, so I figured it was only a matter of time until I understood ROBLOX Lua. For now though, I often relied on free models: models made by other users uploaded to ROBLOX for others to use for free in their games. This provided am easy way for kids to put together cocnepts and games for their friends to enjoy. I did this a lot with my old ROBLOX games, to the point where most of them were just made of free models. I started modifying them, including those with Lua scripts, to start creating what I wanted that nobody else made.

Eventually, my ROBLOX games started to take some sort of solid shape. Most of my games were inspirations of existing games, or games that I wanted to see. They were transformative much like a kid's idea of the perfect game. Seeing others my age join my games made me happy, and I remember meeting some of my friends this way. Others, I happened to meet through other games. The games I frequented and created the most were roleplay games: games that provided an environment and set characters that allowed the user to write and act out stories with one another. This is what got me into roleplaying primarily. While roleplay games were my bread and butter, they weren't all I played. Often, I played games like Hide and Seek, which had many different takes by other users. Simon Says was another one, which I had fond memories of accidentally breaking due to my poor internet. These games, despite some of their structure, felt like a sandbox. A sandbox that gave you specific toys to play with, but it didn't judge you on how you used the toys. They all encouraged some sort of player interactivity.

For those who really wanted to be connected to the community, there was the ROBLOX forums. Not to be confused with the developer forums, meant specifically for developers. These forums were introduced very early in ROBLOX's lifespan, in 2004. While I rarely used the forums, many people loved them. However, ROBLOX's forums were not perfect. They were riddled with trolls, moderator abuse, and were especially prone to dogpiling. Even in 2011, the forums were commonly regarded as being a bit toxic. Part of this was attributed to children, as unfortunately, children can be VERY nasty to one another. However, a big issue regarding the forums was the moderator activity. While the forum moderators were constanly under scrutiny for being ridiculously strict or unfair, arguably the biggest flaw is how they were often inactive during the night. This allowed for users to get away with rule-breaking posts for hours until the morning.

ROBLOX continued to improve as each year went on. New features in Studio allowed users to utilize new tools to create their games, to stylize the environment, and to immerse the player. ROBLOX knew its playerbase was wide, so it allowed users to search by genre. The genres were limited, but they often helped players find a specific niche and congregate. There was a wide variety of games on the ROBLOX platform, often stylized and constructed like mini-games, but held strong for lasting impacts on its users. A lot of them were silly, childish, short, and ameture, but that was a huge part of its charm. It felt like the platform's content was created BY the kids that used the platform, and that's largely because it was. Kids know what they want, and if you give them the tools, they'll either make it or find it.

A common criticism that has been around since ROBLOX was a year old is that "old ROBLOX was better." People were saying this back during 2013 as well, one of ROBLOX's best years. Most kids went along with this criticism, but it wasn't really something that was founded on anything other than "the community was better." This was a common talking point that lasts to this day, but the way the argument holds is much different now.

The Fall

I feel like ROBLOX's fall can be pin-pointed to 2017. To summarize why I feel this way:

• Janurary 10: ROBLOX's logo was redesigned to be minimalist and modern, forgoing the blocky but loud shapes
• October 2: The ability to play as a Guest is removed
• October 26: Searching games by genre was removed for an undisclosed reason
• December: The ROBLOX forums were shut down following a series of raids and a user posting a link to CSEM, the link staying for 30 minutes

Now, these are relatively minor compared to current events. However, I feel that the downfall of the platform is best represented by the logo resdesign. It was a clear shift in ROBLOX's market away from children and towards older users. This wasn't inherently bad. However, this was also at a time where many companies were shifting to become "modern" by leaning into minimalism, which often made everything feel more corperate as a result. Because the design language of all of these products, companies, and sites were now homogenising, it confused its consumers and users. This was especially the case with regards to YouTube, where its interface has gone through so many changes that it's been described as annoying to navigate through. ROBLOX has especially suffered from this. This is especially noted by the removal of searching by genre, which made it much harder to discover games.

With this in mind, it's important to state that ROBLOX has always had issues as a platform. During its early life, it's arguable that its problems stemmed from a small management team and learning how to navigate moderating a platform of children. While many sites existed dedicated solely to children, ROBLOX was unique in the sense it thrived off of user creations. Scratch is like this as well, however it was always intended to be a learning tool. ROBLOX was initially made as a physics engine, later retooled into a game creation platform. There wasn't many sites like ROBLOX. Unfortunately, this led to a lot of issues, especially regarding child safety. But even with this in mind, it is disgusting how negligent ROBLOX can be. I remember, sometime in 2016, I was messaged a link to a Newgrounds porn animation of My Little Pony. I was 14. I'm absolutely sure I'm not the only person who's had this kind of explicit content sent to me. All one needs to do is look up incidents regarding MeepCity, created by Alexnewtron.

MeepCity is horrendusly infamous for its incredibly lax moderation on inappropriate content. Created on Feburary 23 of 2016, it surpassed one billion visits on Janurary 30 of 2018. This goes to show how many people played it. This is important to demonstrate the size of victims that have likely been exposed to harmful content. I won't go into every single incident that's happened on this platform, but I do want to at least highlight a few statements from Alexnewtron regarding his game's safety.

For context, "ODing" stands for online dating, a term that many children at the time used in order to refer to predators who searched for victims via searching for a romantic partner. Sometimes, roleplayers got accused of being online daters, which often watered down the term. The term SHOULD be in reference to two people who met online and are dating with mutual consent. This term has been used with the predatory definition for a long time on ROBLOX, and my only guess is because of the young nature of the platform and not being fully educated on predators.

In these posts, Alexnewtron is dismissing concerns of explotative people in his game, just saying to report them to ROBLOX instead of banning them from his own game. He mocks people pointing this out and saying that the ROBLOX report system doesn't work by replying to false bans with "oh hey look, reporting works." No, that's a clear exploitation of the system put in place! Reporting has INFAMOUSLY not worked for YEARS at that point!!! And the worst part? He was an intern at ROBLOX at this time. In so many of these replies, he's consistently victim blaming, insisting that evidence is being faked, and doing ANYTHING he can to escape responisibility. And most of these posts are within A MONTH, by an OFFICIAL INTERN. There's more controversy surrounding Alexnewtron, such as his gore fetish surrounding a blue Yoshi and was SURPRISINGLY public about it on his Twitter account. I've seen his fetish art, but I don't have a desire to look it up and share it. Just know that this man at worst is irresponsible, and at worst is willfully enabling predation within his game, being just as bad as preforming these actions on children himself.

Honestly, I don't need to get too deep into the Schlep situation because of how wildly covered it is. To summarize, Schlep is a user on ROBLOX that's been around almost as long as I have and was groomed on the platform. Since then, he's been determined to prevent anyone else becoming preyed upon on the platform and actively works with law enforcement to arrest predators. He arrested 6 pedophiles before ROBLOX sent him a cease and desist, deleting all of his accounts alongside the order. This sparked a site and world-wide outrage, and understandably so.

Lots of people tend to talk about Ruben Sim, who's also been sued by ROBLOX before. However, he has a lot of issues that make me really hate him. Let me be clear and state him exposing MrObvious, a ROBLOX animator and user on the platform, for being a pedophile is genuinely good. I think the world deserves to know he is a pedophile and get him away from more victims. However, he's also done a lot of things over the years that have made me feel his predator hunting is preformative. He makes fun of queer people, having made fun of people using they/them pronouns on him in videos saying "I'm not multiple people!" He's gone on record for YEARS painting ANY and ALL furries as predators, which is a dangerous mindset to have considering a lot of them are also queer and or transgender. I don't have to bring up how often trans women often get painted as pedophiles just for being women. To be clear, furries have a serious problem in their community with predators and zoophiles (see: the admins behind FurAffinity regularly defending and protecting zoophiles and pedophiles). However, it is dangerous to call them all pedophiles, especially when being a furry isn't inherently sexual and many children ARE furries. I also cannot stand Ruben's videos as a victim myself, because his videos often only serve the purpose to make fun of pedophiles and nothing more. He's made videos where he gets creators of NSFW ROBLOX games to sing for him so he can laugh at them. If my story was shared this way, I would genuinely consider suicide as my story is not being used to support and help victims. In this case, it would be used just for cheap laughs. It's disgusting and I hate the sensationalism of grooming. I hate how people justify it as "oh well, it won't get much attention otherwise!" It would and DOES get attention without the sensationalism!! All the time!

Conclusion

I want to like ROBLOX. I still love ROBLOX despite these horrible life-ruining issues plaguing it. The last thing I want is for ROBLOX as a platform to go under, but because of company management, I'm afraid this is what will happen. No wonder ROBLOX is working so hard to shield the predators of its platforms. David Baszucki was invited to Trump's inauguration, which as we know, the latter is a MAJOR person present consistently throughout the Epstein files. Both David and John Shedletsky, latter being a former ROBLOX staff memebr, are deeply interested in AI generated content and how it's "beneficial." ROBLOX is my childhood turned into a predator grifting ring and I hate it.