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Toontown had a perfectly good system for interacting with other players from outside the game: you would get a code and exchange it via some other established c
by mullingitover 2y ago
Toontown had a perfectly good system for interacting with other players from outside the game: you would get a code and exchange it via some other established channel with someone you already knew (over the phone, AOL instant messenger, etc). Once you had that you could chat normally, without needing SpeedChat. For a minute there was a workaround someone figured out for sharing text in the game (as discussed in the article) that would've potentially let people share codes and start chatting outside SpeedChat. Big yikes, patched immediately.
Disney cared about children's online safety obsessively, and would have preferred to close down the whole virtual world and lay off the team rather than put a single child at risk.
Source: I worked there for several years.
- Nk26 2y agoThey also had a way to share friend codes in game. I don’t remember exactly what it was but there was a mechanism that had letters on a wall and combined with a few other things you could make out someone’s code. Source: my wife played this for way too long.
- rockemsockem 2y agoLmfao at patched immediately. My wife played Toon Town as a kid and in-game code sharing was by far her favorite part of the entire game. It also really doesn't sound like it was patched "immediately".
- mullingitover 2y agoThis happened before I started there, but from my understanding it was patched as soon as it was discovered. It was a tricky thing to catch since it's not something that readily shows up unless you're spying on every one of the tens of thousands of client sessions, and this was before YouTube when someone would've posted a video about it for clout.
- duskwuff 2y ago> Big yikes, patched immediately. How was this "patched"?
- xg15 2y agoNot obsessively enough to employ some actual moderators though. I find it interesting that the only understanding of "safety" was to put the players into a sort of digital straitjacket which made the social aspect of the game effectively unusable (and if used as intended would have made it impossible to get to know new people inside the game) - but at the same time, when people figured out how to break the straitjacket, apparently no one cared. Did the company ever check if the players inventing that "furniture protocol" or sharing codes on message boards were just inventive kids or exactly the kind of harrassers or groomers that the system was supposed to prevent?
- egypturnash 2y agoYes. Systems like this always feel trying to make a kindergarten with no teachers there to notice when the kids are being jerks to each other and make it stop. There's just a robot who enforces a very limited code of speech.
- aprilnya 2y ago> a perfectly good system for interacting with other players from outside the game That’s not the point. The point is you can’t do the opposite, you can’t make real friends on Toontown
- mullingitover 2y agoThat was 1000% a feature and not a bug. It's naive to think that a concentration of children on the internet is safe from creeps without some safety measures. I, too, wish there weren't bad people in the world and we could just trust everyone around our kids.
- mmcgaha 2y agoI met a lot of folks playing TT and the method that I used most was to jump for numbers and the first letter of speed chat was the letter. Adults and older teens picked up on it and kids did not so it worked out well. I played some TT rewritten a couple of years back and everyone can just chat away. My opinion is that restricted chat was better.