Can You Find a Friend Path Through a Banned Roblox Account?

What "banned" actually does

Roblox has several moderation states: temporary suspension, account warning, account deletion, account termination (permanent ban), and the rare "POISON" flag for accounts hidden from all public APIs. Most of these affect what the user can do — logging in, joining experiences, chatting, posting — but they don't strip the account's historical friendships from the friends API.

For a typical permanently-terminated account, you can still query https://friends.roblox.com/v1/users/{id}/friends and get the full list of who they were friends with. The profile page itself often shows a "Banned" badge, but the underlying data is intact. This is intentional on Roblox's side — it lets moderation tools and graph-analysis tools inspect what banned accounts were connected to, which is useful for investigating abuse patterns.

What FriendPath does

FriendPath traverses banned accounts exactly like any other node. Their friend list gets fetched, expanded into the next BFS layer, and added to the visited set. If a banned account happens to sit on the shortest path between your two search targets, it'll appear in the returned chain like any other intermediate user.

You'll occasionally see "Banned" labels in the path display when this happens. The label comes from the profile-enrichment step where we fetch display names and badges for the path nodes — Roblox returns an isBanned: true flag on the user object even though the friendships are queryable. FriendPath surfaces this in the UI so you know that node is no longer an active player.

The only true dead-ends

A few account states genuinely prevent traversal:

• "POISON" flag — used for severely-blacklisted accounts. The friends API returns an empty list. Extremely rare.
• Account deletion (vs ban) — when a user requests full account removal under GDPR/CCPA, the account is wiped and its friends API endpoint returns 404. Different from a ban.
• UK-located accounts — since the 2023 UK Online Safety Act, the friends API returns empty for any UK-located account regardless of moderation state. Big chunk of the graph is invisible.
• Manually-private friend lists — users can opt to hide their friend list in privacy settings; same effect.

Banning specifically is NOT in that list. A regular ban doesn't make a friend path through that account impossible.

Re-instated accounts

If Roblox lifts a ban after appeal, the account comes back fully — the same friend list, profile, and data that was there before. No re-indexing or migration needed. FriendPath's results don't care whether an account was previously banned; we just see the current state of the friends API.

Want to test it?

If you happen to know a previously-banned Roblox account ID, you can search a path involving it. You'll usually find one as long as the banned account had public friends before the ban. The path-display UI will mark the banned node with a small "Banned" badge but the chain itself is real.