About 10 accounts are banned each day, according to Timothy Lee, who supervises the group of employees whose job it is to monitor the filter and answer "911" reports -- filed by children to report the bad behavior of others.
On a recent afternoon, three of the employees sat in a carpeted attic in Pasadena monitoring children on the site. One sorted through the 911 reports, absolving one kid who called another a "wiener head" and banishing another who implied he wanted to have cybersex.
Another monitor sorted through the conversations, stripping chat or internal e-mail privileges from various users, including one who tried to get through the filter and ask another avatar where he went to school by typing "SKOOL." There were some tough calls: Is writing "Go kill UR mama" a punishable offense? How about "hello female dog"?
Some cases are more straightforward. Daniel Kunka, a student at Cal State L.A., was hired by Whyville to float around the site watching for suspicious behavior or banned words and meting out punishment. When a girl uttered the "b" word, Kunka rendered her unable to chat for three days.
Other sites have set up stings to catch cheaters, posing as children or watching players who know information that could be acquired only by cheating. Some of the monitoring borders on pesky. Kids sometimes roll their eyes at moderators and continue whatever it was they were doing.
"When in doubt, we err on the side of the user," said Debbi Colgin, head of community and customer services at Habbo, a virtual world that monitors its chats 24 hours a day. "We would rather educate them and warn them than not."
In November, Dutch police arrested a teen who stole passwords and furniture from Habbo users, and they questioned five others. The case is pending.
Eric Ey, a 14-year-old from Anaheim, doesn't think Whyville could monitor more than it already does, because kids will always find a way to get around the rules. Also, he said, it's often difficult to find out who is cheating online.
"You go to a playground and push some kid, you've got a teacher coming after you," he said. "Online, it's hard to trace."
It's no comfort for parents. Joanna Stebbins, mother of Sophia, put parental controls on the family's computers, blocking Internet chat rooms and adult-occupied virtual worlds such as Second Life to protect her daughter from adults she didn't know.
But Stebbins didn't think to be concerned about virtual worlds for kids.
