Destriv

I've been a Geometry Dash moderator for four years. I'm posting this because the state of moderation in this game has been visible internally for years and hasn't moved, and I don't think staying quiet about it is defensible any more. Nobody here needs me to describe what the comment sections look like. Slur bypasses, spam, harassment aimed at specific players, links out to other sites. You've all scrolled past it. Levels are their own problem. Some are built to display sexual or racist content that a text filter can't catch. Names get through too, sometimes bypassed the same way comments are, sometimes just in languages the filter doesn't cover. What you may not have clocked is one specific pattern. Sexual comments aimed directly at other players, some of them clearly children. Accounts asking people to DM them, or to click their profile for private roleplay on another platform, some tagged 18+, some offering to be the other person's "master." None of this is new. What happens after that, I can't see. If someone moves to DMs or to another platform, there's no trail, for me or for anyone else on the team. Some of these accounts are trolls doing it for a reaction. That distinction can't be made from the outside, which is the entire problem. A nine-year-old scrolling the comments can't make it either. There's a report button for levels. There is nothing equivalent for comments. What moderators can actually do is narrower than people assume. Regular moderators, which is what I am, can suggest levels for rating. That's essentially it. We cannot delete a comment, ban anyone, or touch an account. Elder Moderators can delete comments and issue comment bans. Beyond that I genuinely don't know where their powers end, and after four years on the team that's its own answer. Nothing has ever been laid out clearly, to us or to anyone. What I can say is what the results look like. Accounts announce how long their comment ban is, then keep posting from a second account while it runs. Whatever the ban is tied to, people get around it, however long it's meant to last. If you've ever wondered why the same names keep coming back, that's why. It isn't the moderators failing to act. There's nothing on their end that makes a ban stick. For scale: there are 95 moderators, 17 of them Elders. Geometry Dash peaked at 110,000 concurrent players on Steam alone this March, and Steam is a fraction of where this game is played. For over a year I ran a bot that logged and reported comments matching a blocklist. It never went a day without matches. Not once. Some of it is trolling. Some of it is organised, from people who set out to flood the game with this. Either way the filters don't stop it, and that's the part that matters. The age ratings are worth checking yourself. Google Play rates the paid version PEGI 12 and flags user interaction. It rates the free Lite version PEGI 3, with the same interaction flag. Apple rates both 4+, a category Apple itself defines as containing no objectionable content. Same game, same open comment feed, three different answers, and one of them is a claim you can disprove by opening the app. A lot of what makes this game work day to day runs on volunteers: the community events, the level requests, the reports. Some of them have done remarkable work for years, with very little public credit. The game owes them far more than it admits. They don't decide how many of them exist, what tools they get, or how the filters work. Reports get picked up within minutes when someone's online. The problem is that a single account can post six violations in eleven minutes and every one needs a human to notice it first. No amount of volunteer effort closes that gap, and it shouldn't be their job to try. Moderation tooling does get built when it's prioritised, which is the point. Over a decade in, comment reporting still doesn't exist for anyone, while the accounts propositioning kids operate entirely in comments. Geometry Dash has sold for over a decade across mobile and Steam, at a scale everyone here can see. As far as I know RobTop still develops it alone. Safety at this scale isn't something one person can carry, and this isn't a project without the means to bring someone in. None of this is technically out of reach in 2026 either. Automated moderation can already catch large classes of this at scale. It won't be perfect. It doesn't have to be. Every comment it catches is one that never reaches a child or a moderator. We've seen how this goes elsewhere. Roblox insisted for years that its safety systems worked, right up until the lawsuits started landing. The allegations are the ones I've just described: weak age verification, open channels between adults and kids, moderation that can't keep up. They shipped real changes eventually, after being sued rather than before. Geometry Dash isn't Roblox and the scale isn't comparable, but the failure modes are the same. Nobody has to wait for the legal version of this conversation. Parents have a role in this and I'm not pretending otherwise. The internet isn't safe for children and supervision matters. But no parent can sit next to their kid through every play session, and it isn't their job to. And yes, there are parental controls. A parent who knows they exist, finds them, and turns comments off can protect their child. That relies on knowing there's something to protect against, and the 4+ rating is the main signal parents get. Defaults matter more than settings. Right now the default is a fully open comment feed in a game rated 4+ on the App Store. I haven't raised this privately with the team, and I want to be upfront about that. It isn't an oversight. Everything I've described happens where the whole team can see it, every day, including the people who make the decisions. This has been visible for years. A private message from me wouldn't have added information, it would have added one more thing to not act on. Going public is the only version of this that changes anything. I'm not publishing internal material and I'm not naming accounts. All of this needs fixing, but it starts with the filters. Every comment caught automatically is one a moderator never has to see. Add comment reporting, for players and for the rest of us. Widen enforcement, because 17 people cannot cover a game this size, and because the things they can't do shouldn't have to go through one person. Give regular moderators something to moderate with. The word is in the title. Right now it mostly means suggesting levels for rating. And none of it can sit in a roadmap. Updates take as long as they take, and that's fine for content. It isn't fine for this. The store listings could be corrected tomorrow, and they should be. I've worked alongside this team and I have a lot of respect for them. None of what I've described is their doing. But the children playing this game are not protected by the system as it stands, and that's worth saying out loud from inside it. I'm still on the team as I post this. I don't know for how long, and that's not really the point. DashTY