Author Archives: matt dusek

Scaling Thumbnail Dependencies with a Rapidly Growing User Base

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cardboardROBLOX allows users to upload images in order to create unique avatar clothing and environments. If you’ve ever uploaded a custom asset, you’ve undoubtedly come across a thumbnail image that says “Review Pending.” That’s because every single image that is uploaded to our storage cloud must be moderated for inappropriate content. Users can’t see the thumbnail of the content until it’s been inspected and approved. In this blog article, we’ll not only walk you through the approval process, but our recently changed process of creating and tracking every thumbnail you see on ROBLOX.

Let’s first step back and define exactly how thumbnail generation works. Uploading a place, model, clothing or decal automatically generates a thumbnail on our website–every one of these thumbnails has a unique ID that is associated with a unique asset ID. This association indicates that the specified asset was used to create a thumbnail of the specified content. The association between the asset and the thumbnail is called a thumbnail dependency. There can be more than one dependency record per thumbnail.

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Kicking off the New Year with Style!

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A little over a week into the brand new year, and already we have a fresh update for all you nice people.  Here are a few things to be on the lookout for as you explore the web site:

  1. Administrator Badges:  It’s a violation of our Terms of Service to impersonate an administrator, and we will delete the account of anyone found to be doing that.  But some people do it anyway.  And if you’re new to ROBLOX or you haven’t been around in a while, you may not know who the real Administrators are.  Now it’s easy to tell.  We’ve added an Administrator Badge to all of the real ROBLOX Administrators.  If anyone claims to be an Admin and they don’t have the badge, they’re not telling you the truth.
  2. Private Message Notifications:  If you’re like us, you were probably getting tired of always needing to go back to your profile to find out if you had any new messages. Well, we’ve added an “alerts” area to the upper right hand corner of the website, available everywhere, which will let you know whenever you have any unread messages.  You can click the link to go directly to your inbox.
  3. Message History:  Sometimes it can be pretty difficult to remember the context of a conversation you’re having by PM.  (It certainly can for Builderman!)  We now add a copy of the original message whenever you click REPLY.  Just like with email, you can delete it if you don’t want it.
  4. Rankings:  We’ve enhanced the rankings charts so you can now view rankings by Hour, Day, Week, Month, or All-Time.  This way, you can see who the up-and-comers are — not just the people who have been playing the longest.  We also hyperlinked all the results so it’s easier to go check out the user or place for yourself.  If you think you noticed some changes to the leaders, it’s not your imagination. We closed a loophole in the Combat Leaders that could allow someone to get multiple Knockouts for one Wipeout.  We’re also combining multiplayer and solo visits for Most Popular Places.  Moreover, visits by you to your own place won’t be included in the tally (that’s too easy!).  So the results have shuffled around a bit.
  5. Fly-Bug Fixed:  It was fun while it lasted (sometimes), but the fly-bug is no more.  Some of you will celebrate: no more assaults from the sky.  Others will be sorry to see it go.  Don’t worry: flight within ROBLOX is something that we like, too.  There are still jetpacks, rocketboots, and the like.  Look for more flying options coming down the pike.

Those are the highlights.  Of course, there are a host of behind-the-scenes improvements as always — exception handling, caching, Builderman’s daily overhaul of the physics engine.  Still, it seems like there was something else … something you might not notice if I weren’t here to tell you.

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