October 22, 2008
Subject: Now Offers 'Safe Menu Chat' Only
Dear Interested Parents:
I am Maxine Clark, Founder and Chief Executive Bear of Build-A-Bear Workshop®. I founded this company in St. Louis in 1997 and built a business based on integrity, value, fun, and giving back to our community. Build-A-Bear Workshop has been successful because we have listened to our Guests -- children and parents, every step of the way.
Child safety is paramount -- we stand with parents to make sure that Build-A-Bearville is a fun and safe place to play -- we put safety first in our stores, in our products, online, and in our virtual world.
I personally want to update you on an important step we have taken to limit the chat capability in buildabearville.com. Until recently, Build-A-Bearville provided parents with two chat options to choose from: 'safe menu chat', for Guests 12 years and younger, and 'safe open chat', for Guests over 13 years old.
Effective October 16, 2008, we disabled 'safe open chat' and now our virtual world Guests can ONLY communicate using 'safe menu chat'. 'Safe menu chat' allows communication using only pre-defined words and phrases; these words and phrases can not be changed. Until technology is available to prevent potential abuse we will continue to use 'safe menu chat'.
Through our ongoing monitoring of the site, we identified abuse of the 'safe open chat' feature. Although our 'safe open chat' option has always blocked inappropriate words, we found it was possible to use a combination of punctuation and otherwise appropriate words to form suggestive expressions that could be interpreted as not appropriate. Since the vast majority of our Guests in Build-A-Bearville use 'safe menu chat', a small number of people were exposed to these unacceptable expressions. This absolutely violated our online safety rules and was not tolerated. The violators were immediately banned from our site and we quickly moved to limit the chat capability to 'safe menu chat' only. We have also taken steps to prevent violators from opening new character accounts on the site.
At Build-A-Bear Workshop safety is our first priority. If you would like to join our Parent's Advisory Panel -- a parent group that from time to time is asked to review and give input on products, services and online features -- please send an email to
parentadvisors@buildabear.com. If you have any questions regarding Build-A-Bearville or this change, please contact me at
Maxineclark@buildabear.com.
We appreciate your interest in Build-A-Bear Workshop and Build-A-Bearville; it is interested and engaged Guests like yourself that help us do a better job!
Beary truly,
Maxine Clark
Founder and Chief Executive Bear