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I used to play Roblox when I was a teenager. The game has a scripting engine that players can use to program their own levels/events in Lua. The code editing/debugging was pretty tough to use when I was playing it, but it's one of the reasons I got into programming. I learned about programming, viruses, and hacking through Roblox. People write all kinds of amazing scripts on Roblox that you can download and put into your own levels.



Ah yes, the viruses; I remember those.

People would write scripts that would copy themselves into every object in the game, sometimes renaming those objects to a constant string just to be annoying. People who would edit their games in "build mode" (I can't actually remember what it was called) rather than directly in Roblox Studio would import an infected model from the store, get their place infected, and then any models they shared on the store would _also_ be infected.

I wrote an "anti-virus" script that would search an entire place for known viruses, delete them, and reset the names of any renamed objects back to their default. Eventually Roblox themselves started clearing the source code of any virus scripts they knew about, which I discovered when several of my "virus definitions" files got blanked out.

Those were the days. I wonder if viruses on Roblox are still a thing, or if Roblox managed to put a stop to them for good. (Less people editing their places in build mode would probably make viruses way less effective.)




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