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
Thanks for working on this!! It’s terrible what some people think is ok to put on a kids game, smh.
One can’t help but wonder why things have gotten coarser and crueler and crooked over such a relatively short period of time. Thank you, Webkinz, for a safe space to enjoy games and a little bit of fantasy.
first Roblox and now Webkinz bad actors need to just stop at this point no one realizes one misbehaving player can ruin an experience for all Thank you for being better than Roblox at moderating and actually listening to players.
Thank you for addressing this and reassuring everyone that Webkinz will remain a safe place for all.
I am glad that they are being removed, that is not the type of thing I want to see while playing Webkinz.
Thank you for caring about the safety of this community <3
Thank you so much for all that you have done to maintain a safe space for all of us.
Thank you for all you do. I honestly just glance when a pet’s name goes up. Luckily Neither I nor my grand daughter have witnessed this. So sad someone intrudes on a happy and fun activity. Sadly they probably don’t care. Thank you for the monituring you do.
NOTE ASIDE: Has anyone besides me found that every single time I try to start Starfall for one of the challenges the game won’t start and not only that, I get semi booted out of the game?
This is genuinely heartbreaking, my absolute favorite part of Webkinz was seeing the fun punny names and now it’s just the first three letters, how lame. Not mad at Ganz here, mad at the bad apples that had to ruin something fun. Yet again. :((