Welcome to the Developer Update for September 25.
Today’s featured world is Steps of Time/時間の階段 by _Harim.
Announcements
Spookality is Back!
That’s right – Spookality is back again!
Spookality is our annual celebration of the dark, spooky, and ██████. This year, creators can submit avatars and worlds between September 22 and October 13. We will announce the winners (and post world and avatar rows) on October 22.
Both Avatars and Worlds will be judged – and the winners will receive rewards!
You can read more about it here.
We Updated Our Community Guidelines & Then Grandma Forwarded Me A Screenshot of a Screenshot of a Screenshot of Someone Taking It Totally Out of Context
Yesterday, we posted a clarified version of our Community Guidelines along with a blog post reaffirming our commitment to protecting the VRChat experience for everyone.
None of our rules changed! Instead, we’re trying to clarify and organize our rules better so that they align with how we enforce them. This is a foundational step toward improving our reporting flow and improving VRChat for everyone.
If you want the real deal, read the blog. We’re the first party source, after all!
After we launched these changes, a few posts made it out into the wild and spread very fast. These posts made statements like: “VRChat is banning avatar uploaders” or “private events are required to use Age Verification”.
These statements are incorrect! Let’s clear it up.
The Terms of Service have not changed.
We changed the Community Guidelines. The Guidelines provide a human-readable (non-legalese) version of our rules that align with how we enforce our rules.
We are not banning people for sharing passwords.
We know lots of people upload avatars for their friends or on commission. It isn’t a great solution to share your password, but we 100% hear you – until a better solution exists, you’re gonna keep doing it.
With that said: You really, really shouldn’t share your password or put it into third-party tools or sites. It’s the #1 way accounts get stolen.
“Provocative” is a defined term.
Some users were worried about the usage of “provocative” in the Community Guidelines. We define it as clearly as we can:
- Adult content or behavior, controversial topics
- Sensitive, intimate, or provocative content or activities
We must be somewhat vague here, because this type of content is very context-dependent and subjective. If you start trying to define hard lines for it, you end up writing a 50-page article and drawing lines on plastic dolls. In the famous words of a past US judge: “I’ll know it when I see it.”
Either way, what we’re asking here is the same thing we asked in the previous verison of our guidelines:
Keep private things private. If you have avatars or do things that someone might consider sensitive, intimate, or provocative, keep it in private spaces with people that consent and can consent* to seeing or participating in it.
*The important bit here is that minors can never consent. It’s on you to ensure that nobody around you in these situations is a minor. This has always been the case, but we’re being crystal-clear now – and you have a tool (age verification) to fix this problem entirely.
We are not requiring that you use AV to ensure you’re in compliance, but it does make it very easy and effective.
wait, so the discord screenshot written by a rando that someone forwarded me was wrong??
Yep.
So, one last time: None of our rules have changed, and our enforcement has not changed. We’ve simply laid things out more clearly so we all know where we stand.
Discord Linking, Login, and Account Creation
Soon you’ll have the ability link your Discord and VRChat accounts together, giving you a new option to quickly log in on all of our existing platforms. This also gives brand new users the ability to create an account by simply signing in with an existing Discord account.
How does it work?
Link your Discord
You’ll have the option to link your Discord on all of our existing platforms (on PC, standalone, the VRChat website, and mobile) using a new button in the settings on each page.
Platform accounts (Steam, Meta) will need to upgrade to a full VRChat account before they can link their Discord. We’ve made this a part of the linking flow, so it should be pretty painless.
When you click the “Link Your Discord” button you’ll get an email from VRChat at the email address associated with your VRChat account to complete the process any time, on your platform of choice. You’ll be directed to Discord to confirm the account link, then you’re done!
Account Creation with Discord
This one’s probably not for you if you’re reading the Dev Update… but it’s worth mentioning!
If you don’t already have a VRChat account and click on the “Log in with Discord” button on the login page, you’ll sign in using your existing Discord account. We check to make sure that there’s no existing VRChat account that matches your Discord’s email address, and if there is, you’ll be prompted to link instead.
Log in with Discord
Once your VRChat and Discord accounts are linked you’ll be able to use the new “Log in with Discord” button on the login screen. This should help you get into VRChat a lot faster if you’re already signed in to Discord on that device!
Unlink your Discord Account
You can unlink your Discord account at any time directly inside of Discord, or through the VRChat website.
Some Additional Notes…
- A VRChat account can only have one linked Discord account, and vice versa.
- Have a few different email addresses? You can mix and match email addresses if you link them through the button in client, on web, or on mobile. For example, your VRChat account and Discord account can be linked even if they have different email addresses associated with them.
- If you click on the “Log in with Discord” button on the login page we’ll attempt to find an existing VRChat account that matches the one provided by Discord. You’ll have the option to link the two accounts together if there’s a match.
- You’ll be asked to re-authenticate your VRChat sign if you try to link through the login page for security reasons.
Help Us Do Research… On You!
We’re partnering with UserTesting to give our community another, easier way to share feedback on early ideas, design concepts and user experience prototypes.
What to Expect
- You may receive an email invitation to complete a short survey or unmoderated test hosted on UserTesting.
- Typical time commitment: 15–20 minutes.
- Many studies include compensation for your time and insights as a thank you!
Legitimacy & Safety
- Invitations will come from VRChat (e.g., an email ending in @vrchat.com) and/or UserTesting on our behalf.
- These invitations are legitimate and part of our official research program.
- We’ll always include consent information before you begin.
- Never share passwords or sensitive personal information during a study.
Who Can Participate
- We’re currently running studies in English.
- Some invitations target specific types of users or devices. If you don’t qualify for one study, you may qualify for future ones.
How Your Feedback is Used
- Your responses help us improve VRChat features and experiences.
- We may collect screen/audio recordings during a task to understand usability; any data is handled according to our privacy and consent guidelines.
Questions? Need Help?
- If you’re unsure whether an invitation is from us, or you have any questions, contact ur@vrchat.com (or directly reply to the invite).
Thank You!
– The User Research Team
A Status Update on PhysBones, Contacts and VRChat Constraints in Worlds
A few developer updates ago, we revealed our plans to bring PhysBones, Contacts and VRChat Constraints to the Worlds SDK.
As of around a week ago, we’ve been running a closed community beta for this feature, giving us our first round of feedback from the community and helping us move it towards a full release.
We’re currently addressing some feedback around usability and functionality as well as working through suggested features.
In the meantime, our closed beta testers have been busy building the first few test worlds to use these components (if you’re one of them, thank you!) - here’s a clip of a few contact tests!
Clarification on VRChat Image Hotlinking
In the September 19 2024 Dev Update, we announced that hotlinking to images hosted on VRChat servers would no longer be permitted.
After that announcement, we rolled out a change to our web application firewall to block hot linking images. That change, however, was rolled back.
We rolled this back to accommodate application developers, who needed more time to change their applications and infrastructure.
As time has passed, we’re now once again moving forward with changes that will prevent hot linking.
In a future server-side change, VRChat’s API will be referencing image URLs based on short-lived signed URLs rather than the /api/1/image/… and /api/1/file/… URLs that we’ve used so far. We’re therefore (still) asking users to change the way they serve images by proxying and caching them on their own infrastructure instead.
Conclusion
That’s it for this Dev Update! Check back on October 9 for the next one!
