• Roblox has announced more parental controls being added to the platform.
• Parents are now able to block and report other players on their children’s friends list.
• The new features still require a child’s account to be linked to that of their parents.

In recent years the wildly popular game Roblox has been described by researchers as a “Pedophile Hellscape For Kids”.

While this has done little to dent its popularity, it is now on the radar of parents wanting to keep tabs on their children and ensure they are not potentially being groomed or shown explicit material.

It is why Roblox announced the rollout of new safety features in October of last year, and why new ones are regularly being added to the mix. The latest controls for parents come in the form of being able to block other players or events on the platform.

Per The Verge, the new controls are part of the account management features rolled out last year, which gave parents and guardians a bit more visibility into the people their children play with, as well as the experiences and events they engage with.

It is worth pointing out, however, that these new features are still dependent on children linking their account to that of their parents, which is something we question, as there is still the ability to have another Roblox account sitting in the background that no other authority figure may know about.

While it remains to be seen how Roblox can police such workarounds, the company’s chief safety officer, Matt Kaufman, has confirmed that parents now block specific profiles that are on their children’s friends list in-game, as well as barring them from taking part in any activities or experiences.

Children under the age of 13 cannot unblock those profiles their parents have blocked, but can request an unblock. As for the experiences block, previously, only content of a certain age restriction could be blocked, but now, anything can be blocked.

Whether these additional controls will give parents greater peace of mind remains to be seen, but for now, workarounds still exist, so full transparency on what their children do on Roblox can never truly be achieved.

[Image – Photo by Oberon Copeland on Unsplash]