R.I.P. CLUB PENGUIN

Child safety

Club Penguin was designed for the ages of 6–14. Thus, one of the major concerns when designing Club Penguin was how to improve both the safety of participants and the suitability of the game to children. As Lane Merrifield stated, "the decision to build Club Penguin grew out of a desire to create a fun, virtual world that I and the site's other two founders would feel safe letting our own children visit." As a result, Club Penguin maintained a strong focus on child safety, to the point where the security features were described as almost "fastidious" and "reminiscent of an ", although it was also argued that this focus might "reassure more parents than it alienate[d]."

The system employed a number of different approaches in an attempt to improve child safety. The key approaches included preventing the use of inappropriate ;providing an "Ultimate Safe Chat" mode, which limited players to selecting phrases from a list; using an automatic during "Standard Safe Chat" (which allowed users to generate their own messages) and blocked even when users employed "creative" methods to insert it into sentences; filtering seemingly innocuous terms, such as "mom"; and blocking both telephone numbers and email addresses. It also included employing paid ; out of 100 staff employed in the company in May 2007, Merrifield estimated that approximately 70 staff were dedicated to policing the game. It also included promoting users to "EPF (Elite Penguin Force) Agent" status, and encouraging them to report inappropriate behavior.

Each game server offered a particular type of chat—the majority allowing either chat mode, but some servers allowed only the "Ultimate Safe Chat" mode. When using "Standard Safe Chat", all comments made by users were filtered. When a comment was blocked, the user who made the comment saw it, but other users were unaware that it was made—suggesting to the "speaker" that they were being ignored, rather than encouraging them to try to find a way around the restriction.

Beyond these primary measures, systems were in place to limit the amount of time spent online, and the site did not feature any advertisements, because, as described by Merrifield, "within two or three clicks, a kid could be on a gambling site or an adult dating site". Nevertheless, after Club Penguin was purchased by Disney, concerns were raised that this state of affairs might change, especially in regard to potential spin-off products—although Disney continued to insist that it believed advertising to be "inappropriate" for a young audience.

Players who used profanity were often punished by an automatic 24-hour ban, although not all vulgar language resulted in an immediate ban. Players found by moderators to have broken Club Penguin rules were punished by a ban lasting "from 24 hours to forever depending on the offence."