For the past few weeks, a bad actor has been actively creating free accounts with offensive pet names and then earning high scores in specific games so that those pet names are shown to all players. We have been removing these names as fast as we can find them. Unfortunately, this person refuses to stop and at this time we have been forced to take more drastic steps.
We have now reduced the number of letters shown in our high score lists and high score displays in the arcade for pet names down to three, matching the Usernames. This is not a long-term solution, as we know that players work hard to get onto these lists and enjoy seeing their pets displayed, but it will effectively stop the problem.
Our pet name system relies on a bad word filter, aka a blacklist. We block hundreds of bad words and words that we don’t want to see in pet names. And for over twenty years, this has worked. The vast majority of players give their pets fun names that expresses their creativity and love for their pet. Unfortunately, people can say very bad things with common words that are not bad words by themselves.
We are looking into longer term solutions that will maintain our players ability to use fun and creative names, while preventing the abuse we are seeing here. We hope to roll these out in the new year.
We do apologize to all players who have had to view these offensive names. We value all our incredible players and see Webkinz World as an inclusive, welcoming space for everyone.
The Webkinz Team
Thank you Webkinz for all our guys hard work in dealing with this
Thank you for dealing with this. I know sometimes the same word can mean different things in different places – or with different generations, but some words are just intently mean.
Why have leaderboards to begin with? I can’t even say I pay attention to any of it because who cares. Why does everything have to be a competition with the world? It’s beyond my comprehension. Like seriously so not important.
You have to remember that this game is for children. A child thinks differently about seeing their pet’s name as a champion.
If it wasn’t for the vitriol behind these names, I might actually feel kind of bad for whoever is dedicating this much time to doing this. Like seriously, that’s got to be a sad, angry, empty life for someone to funnel this much effort into getting banned from a kids’ game repeatedly.
IKR! I couldn’t believe someone would waste their time either!
Thank you. I was going to write about this. There is no need for political names and I’ve seen so many of them as you mention as high scores. This is a fun game. It’s a shame that someone feels the need to do this. I totally agree with 100pets100. It’s a kids game.
Is there a way you could ip ban the person who keeps making those accounts?
That was going to be my suggestion, but I was wondering if it could be circumvented using… won’t give ideas just in case. Either way, I think it’s worth a shot at this point. It’s getting ridiculous.
I thought about this when it first started. Think the problem is that the accounts are linked to an email account and there is no way to prevent the bad actor to keep getting new emails.
If a person uses a VPN there is no way to ban the IP address, even banning all of the VPN providers out there would take a very long time because there are so many providers of VPN’s that we would be days in maintenance and no one wants that.
Oh good, I’m glad this is being viewed. I have seen a few names that I cannot believe got thru. Thank you for keeping our game as it’s been for 20 years…clean fun!!!
OMG, get rid of those bad people
So sad. So many sick people
thank you webkinz team for taking action on this! though many of us who grew up with webkinz are adults now, it’s still a kids game at the end of the day. name your pets something cute and move on!