How Roulettly works, without the sales pitch.
The real path your video takes, the case where a direct connection is impossible, and how moderation works.
Free, no account. 18 and over.
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A call starts with a short conversation between your browser and our signalling server. Its only job: help two strangers find each other and swap what is needed to open a connection. Network addresses, video and audio formats, encryption keys. A switchboard, not a pipe.
Once both sides have what they need, the media path is negotiated directly between the two devices. Your camera and microphone stream leaves your machine and arrives on the other person's, with nothing in the middle. The signalling server helped set up the picture; it never sees the picture.
This is standard WebRTC, the same technology your browser uses for video calls elsewhere. The protocol encrypts the stream between the two devices, and the fewer machines it crosses, the fewer places anything could be copied. That is the default for every match on Roulettly.
When a direct connection is impossible
Here is the part most video chat sites leave out. A direct connection is not always possible.
Something always sits between your device and the internet: a home router, a mobile carrier, a company network. Usually both sides still open a path through. Sometimes they cannot. A corporate firewall blocks anything that is not ordinary web traffic. A campus network filters the ports the protocol needs. Or the router does symmetric NAT, which makes the address the other side was given useless.
Then the call has one honest option left: a relay server. Your encrypted stream goes up to the relay, which forwards it to the other person and back the other way. It carries the traffic without storing it, and cannot read it: the encryption is negotiated between the two devices, not with the relay.
We could claim your video never passes through a machine of ours. It would be false, and easy to check. What the relay changes: a longer path, with one of our machines on it. What it does not change: nothing is written to disk, nothing is kept. Direct by default, relay only when the network forces it, nothing recorded either way.
What is never recorded
Video and audio are never recorded. Not on a direct connection, not through a relay. No archive of past matches, no copy kept for review. When a conversation ends the media is gone: it was never written down.
The automatic nudity detection follows the same logic. It runs on your own device, on frames that are already there. They are never uploaded to be analysed somewhere else.
And there is no account to record anything against. You open the page, allow the camera, you are matched. The interface exists in 20 languages, and matching favours someone who speaks yours.
Moderation, in short
Report and block on every match, reports reviewed by our moderation, nudity detection on your own device.
Every match carries a report button and a block button. Report sends the case to our moderation, which reviews it and decides. Block ends it for you and keeps that person out of your next matches.
Nudity detection runs on your own device, so no video has to be sent anywhere to be analysed. The rest is done by people, on the reports they receive.
Why we say this
Because a privacy promise with no mechanism behind it is just a sentence on a page. Tell you the relay exists and you know the worst case up front.
Questions
Does my video go through Roulettly servers?
By default, no. A signalling server negotiates the connection, then video and audio travel directly between the two devices. When a firewall or symmetric NAT blocks that path, the encrypted stream goes through a relay that forwards it without storing it.
Are calls recorded?
No. Video and audio are never recorded, direct or relayed. Nudity detection runs on your own device, so the frames it analyses are never uploaded.
What happens when I report someone?
Report and block are on every match. Reports are reviewed by our moderation, and nudity detection runs on your own device. 18 and over only.