How can we protect the vulnerable online?
Recently, a company I am working on asked to apply to create a forum for kids as part of a website solution.
I think that at least we should recommend
- Human temperance by a trained person to protect these children.
- Alarm / suspicious code analysis on the forum
How does anyone else deal with this and what ideas are other people making on this?
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This is not an online forum, but they do discuss some of the things they have to deal with in order to provide a safe environment for children. Check out the posthumous game of the team that developed Disney toontown: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/2027/postmortem_disney_onlines_.php
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Think of "online" as "a crowded place with strangers." Some of the solutions will be the same, others will not work.
For example, in a shopping mall childcare business, you can require parents to check children and those same parents to get them checked. This type of thinking sometimes leads to the realization that some of the safety must be in the hands of the parents: you cannot "restrict" children online, so protecting them from going to the rest of the Internet must be their parents' job.
But the idea that every child has a responsible adult is probably very good.
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Live moderators are probably best. Disney Toontown actually ran into quite a few privacy / security issues when they missed that kids are often pretty smart.
Although I don't know, still there, there was a function where you had an "apartment" that you could fill with "furniture", a SIMS style, and then map to other players.
This way, players looking to disrupt supervised communication will write letters in furniture one at a time until a screen name is specified for the supervised chat. Presumably, even after this was discovered, there was still an image display system that worked just as well.
To summarize, you cannot cover all bases. The best you can do is cover up the sloppy and inept and try to stay heads-up on strange behavior that might indicate something. So if you need to make a "kids forum" I would definitely go with the moderators.
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