VIRTUAL worlds for children and teenagers  Web sites like Neopets, Club Penguin and Habbo  are a big business. On these sites, children create an avatar and, with it, explore an imaginary universe. They can play games, chat and decorate virtual rooms or other spaces.  Andrew Lintell says his software monitors "intent as well as content."  Tamara Littleton says children use codes to avoid detection.  By the end of this year, there will be 70 million unique accounts  twice as many as last year  in virtual worlds aimed at children under 16, according to K Zero, a consulting firm. Virtual Worlds Management, a media and trade events company, estimates that there are now more than 200 youth-oriented virtual worlds “live, planned or in active development.”  As the number of these virtual worlds grows, so, too, does the demand for sophisticated monitoring software and people, called moderators, who can act as virtual playground monitors. Tamara Littleton, chief executive of eModeration, a company based in London that provides moderation services, says the most common dangers that children and teenagers face online are bullying and young people’s own efforts to share personal information that could enable strangers to identify and contact them in the real world. Sexual predators are always a concern, she says, though she described the likelihood of a child being targeted by an adult with malicious intent as “statistically low.”  Meanwhile, there is a continuing game of cat and mouse between the young people and the technology designed to protect them.  NetModerator, a software tool built by Crisp Thinking, a private company based in Leeds, England, can monitor online chat “for intent as well as content,” says Andrew Lintell, the company’s chief executive. To build the tool, he says, Crisp Thinking analyzed roughly 700 million lines of chat traffic, some from conversations between children and some, like conversations between children and sexual predators, provided by law enforcement groups.  The software is integrated into a virtual world’s site. If the technology uncovers phrasing, syntax, slang or other patterns in a conversation that match known signs of bullying or sexual predation, it sends an alert to a moderator, who can then “drill down” to look not only at the entirety of the specific conversation, but also at every posting from either participant.  “We can capture a full picture of a user’s history on the game,” Mr. Lintell says. NetModerator also includes a filter that is updated regularly to include new words, abbreviations or character combinations that can be read as words, like “sk8.”  Mr. Lintell says the company works with several virtual worlds for children. One is the FusionFall site from the Cartoon Network. FusionFall is an online game geared to children ages 8 to 14, in which children’s avatars fight to save the world with the help of Cartoon Network characters. It uses NetModerator to monitor open chat and player-to-player e-mail, according to Turner Broadcasting, which owns the Cartoon Network.  Keibi Technologies of San Francisco has created technology to determine whether user-generated content  like videos, images and text  contains objectionable material. Jeff Smith, vice president for sales and marketing, says the technology, which also builds a profile of every person who uploads material, is used by several sites aimed at children and teenagers.  The new technologies made it possible for one site to reduce its moderator staff from more than 20 people to just 3 or 4, Mr. Smith says.  For moderators, technical advances have changed the nature of the job, says Bea Marshall, project team leader with eModeration.  Ms. Marshall, who works from her home in Sacramento, says that when she began moderating children’s and teenagers’ chat sites nine years ago, she had to identify and respond to “every infraction that came across the screen.”  Today, with software technology flagging basic infractions and even sending automated warnings, she says she can focus her attention on more subtle or hard-to-interpret messages. This doesn’t mean the job is easy. “Imagine a thousand children, 95 percent of whom have excellent typing skills, all typing at the same time,” she says. “Now try to monitor those conversations as they scroll past you on a screen.”  Ms. Marshall says responses can range from warnings to barring a player for a period of time to “alerting people at a higher level” if she suspects the presence of a predator or fears that a child may be suicidal. In the past five years, she says, she has raised “three or four” alerts about potential sexual predators. Twice in that same period, she says, her alerts have enabled authorities to help suicidal users.  To circumvent filter technologies, children and teenagers use spammers’ tricks like inserting random spaces or deliberate misspellings into their chats. Ms. Littleton has heard of users trying to identify their hometowns in code. (“Opposite of pepper, body of water” is Salt Lake City.) Ms. Marshall has intercepted them trying to share phone numbers by typing the letters that correspond to the digits on a telephone keypad.  When one site blocked the word “love,” Ms. Marshall says, the children substituted the word “glove.”  Such ingenuity is one reason that technology alone will never provide enough protection, she says. “Kids will find a way to communicate,” she says, “and you can’t block every word in the dictionary.”  Technologists agree with her. “There’s no silver bullet from a technical standpoint to do this,” says Mr. Smith at Keibi. “This is about helping humans to make a decision about whether there is a problem.”  Leslie Berlin is project historian for the Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford. E-mail: prototype@nytimes.com.
Moderators are increasingly relying on smart software to flag suspicious activity on virtual-world Web sites aimed at children.