Online Safety
Parent Information
Natterhub provides fun and interactive online safety learning for children and parents. They invite schools and parents to register for free access to their live webinar on Thursday, 23rd of November at 7pm to find more information on how to create a safe digital playground for your child.
To register for the webinar click here.
Information on Roblox
What is the risk to children?
There are four key potential risks children may encounter as they explore, play, and create inside the virtual world of Roblox: being contacted by ill-intentioned adults, encountering inappropriate adult content, facing online bullying from their peers, and overspending inside the Roblox Catalog. Parents are encouraged to have frequent discussions with their children about all of these risks.
Roblox was designed with the intention of being a highly social and interactive environment, where players interact with existing friends and make new ones by wandering around the different user-generated worlds and stopping to talk with other players. Players can also invite friends to co-play and co-create with them within individual games. Like any online multiplayer platform, there is no restriction over the types of people who can join, and there isn’t really any age verification in place (yet). Despite the fact that strict chat filters can be activated - Roblox uses AI to pre-screen content and block inappropriate words and phrases - children are still vulnerable to being contacted by online predators.
This problem isn't unique to Roblox. Throughout the online gaming world, wherever games are marketed to children, online predators lurk. Social games like these are often used to gradually lure children away from the gaming platform and onto other social platforms like Instagram and Snapchat, and even ones like Skype in some cases.
"The chat function poses a real danger to children engaging with this popular gaming platform," explains psychologist Jordan Foster, a leading Online Safety Expert at Family Zone. "While Roblox has done a solid job of putting certain safety measures in place and has provided parents with the option of setting up Account Restrictions, younger children can still be easy prey for predators to communicate with.”
Are there parental controls on Roblox?
Yes - parents can control whether the user can be contacted, who can message them, and restrict access to age-appropriate games, and use a PIN to prevent the child from changing the settings back. However, these restrictions are optional - accounts without a PIN will have no restrictions whatsoever.
How to set up parental controls on Roblox
If your child is 12 or younger, Roblox will automatically add some restrictions to their account, such as filtering the game's text chat in a particularly strict way. If you wish to change the restrictions, this is fairly easy to do: in the game, if you click on the gear/cog icon, you will be taken to the Account Settings page, where you can click into the Privacy section and choose to alter various settings to suit your preferences. Clicking from there into the Account Restrictions page will show you some of your options as a parent.
How to stop strangers from contacting your child on Roblox
One thing you might want to do is make sure that nobody can contact your child unless they are friends. You can find this option by clicking on the cog icon, heading to Account Settings, entering the Privacy section, heading into Contact Settings. On this page, if you select 'Friends', that will mean that nobody that isn't your child's friend can talk to them.
How to disable chat function on Roblox
If you want to disable the chat function on Roblox altogether, this is what you need to do: click the settings cog, go to Account Settings, click into the Privacy section, and head into Contact Settings. Select 'No one' if you don't want anyone to chat to your child through Roblox - not even their friends.
How to report issues and troublesome behaviour on Roblox
If you find out that your child is having a hard time on Roblox and you want to report the other player involved in the situation, this is easy to do: if you click on the Menu button in the top left corner (which looks like three lines stacked on top of each other), and then click onto the little Flag icon next to a player's name, you'll be taken to a form to fill out. You can also find this form if you click the Menu button and then click the Report tab in the menu bar.
How to block people on Roblox
While blocking people in real life is not always as easy as we would like, blocking someone in something like Roblox is much easier and if you want to do it, just follow these steps.
o Go to the user profile of the person you don't ever want to hear from again
o Click the three dots in the top right-hand corner
o Now you will see a menu and one of the options is the block button - so hit that and you're done!
What are ODers on Roblox?
Oders is a shortened way of saying online dating and while there is nothing wrong, generally speaking, with finding love online - a system like Roblox is not the place for it, but there are still several people who use the game with that intent. Those that do try to do it may find that their account is permanently banned as a result so in short, don't do it and stick to something like Tinder if you are looking for love! And from a parent's perspective, you can report or block anyone that shows this intent by following the steps above.
Does Roblox have official resources for parents?
Roblox Corp has a dedicated webpage aimed at parents, which will run you through various matters that will help you understand the game your child is playing. And that page links off to a detailed Frequently Asked Questions page, which may well answer some of your questions and help to put your mind at ease.
Tips for keeping kids safe on Roblox
Other than setting up parental controls, which we guided you through further up the page, the best way to keep your children safe while they are using Roblox is to just keep an eye on them and what they are doing.
