How WebPurify moderates UGC in gaming: avatars, live chat, customization and more

Executive Summary

• ​​From custom avatars to in-game chats, gaming platforms thrive on user-generated content (UGC), but this freedom of expression comes with serious content moderation challenges. Gaming environments require real-time moderation to maintain that balance of communities safe and inclusive while preserving player engagement. WebPurify’s hybrid approach of combining AI-driven detection with human expertise helps mitigate these risks, ensuring that all player UGC enhances gameplay rather than spirals into brand-damaging crisis.

In the early days of gaming, popular titles like Doom and Quake were defined by their mechanics and visuals, with little room for player influence beyond one’s skill and reflexes. But like many other industries, times have changed, and gaming isn’t just about mechanics and graphics anymore — gamers now want player-driven worlds that evolve in real-time. Today, games like Roblox and Fortnite allow their players to create, customize, and communicate on a massive scale. From custom avatars to live chats, a world of user-generated content (UGC) fuels their engagement and creativity, bringing with it a more immersive experience.

But with this creative freedom comes a serious moderation challenge. An offensive avatar can tarnish a game’s reputation. A hateful chat message can spark a community crisis. A well-intentioned customization feature can be hijacked or potentially spark a copyright infringement.

How do you manage millions of UGC interactions every day? How do you filter out toxicity while preserving the all-important competitive banter? How do you protect younger players from harassment and grooming? How do you keep your game safe without slowing down engagement? These are the challenges facing every modern gaming platform.

For the past 18 years, WebPurify has worked alongside game developers and platforms to mitigate these risks and create safer, more enjoyable gaming experiences. With our scalable AI-powered moderation system enhanced by expert human review, WebPurify helps ensure that all UGC aligns with each game’s unique community standards. As Josh Buxbaum, co-founder of WebPurify, explains, “Gaming environments are different from traditional social platforms because interactions happen in real time. You don’t have the luxury of reviewing something hours later. Harmful content needs to be caught and addressed immediately.”

Moderating avatars and profile photos in video games

Profile images are very important in a game, serving as a player’s digital identity, but as you’ll know all too well, they’re also prime real estate for bad actors. Some gaming platforms rely on AI-only moderation to keep tabs on player profiles, but WebPurify’s hybrid approach ensures greater accuracy. Our AI scans your community’s uploaded images, scoring each one for obvious violations. Our model will instantly reject those with high scores for things like nudity, hate symbols, or violence. Borderline cases are then flagged and sent to our human moderators to assess context, ensuring that genuine creativity isn’t mistakenly marked as inappropriate.

Beyond initial AI screening, WebPurify handles user-reported avatars with a fast and informed moderation process. When flagged content is received, moderators see the reported reason — whether it’s an impersonation attempt, a scam, or explicit imagery.

“Our team moderates flagged avatars within two minutes or less,” Josh says. “The key here is speed. When a player reports something offensive, they expect it to be dealt with immediately. If they see the same harmful content hours later, they lose faith in the system, and that impacts engagement, retention, and overall trust in a platform. Fast moderation keeps your community engaged and happy.”

Gaming avatars are also increasingly tied to customization mechanics, allowing players to design skins, accessories, and outfits that reflect their identity. However, with this freedom comes the risk of players inserting offensive symbols, hateful language, or even copyrighted material into their avatars. WebPurify’s moderation process ensures that such violations are caught early, protecting both players and developers from legal or reputational risks.

Another major challenge game developers face is moderating AI-generated avatars and deepfake technology, which some platforms are now beginning to integrate. As AI becomes more advanced, malicious users are finding ways to bypass traditional moderation methods by altering images in subtle ways that the AI might miss. WebPurify continues to evolve its content moderation tools on a weekly basis to stay ahead of these trends, offering custom solutions that fit each gaming platform’s unique UGC ecosystem.

“By combining real-time AI filtering, rapid human review, and adaptable moderation strategies, WebPurify helps game developers ensure that player avatars enhance — and never harm — the community experience,” Josh says.

Real-time text moderation for in-game chat

Gaming chat is the lifeblood of these communities. It’s where players form alliances, engage in banter, and coordinate their strategies. But the same chat channels that cultivate your community can also become breeding grounds for toxicity, harassment, and hate speech. WebPurify’s text moderation system is designed to filter out problematic content without stifling engagement.

Instead of relying on simple keyword detection, WebPurify’s AI-powered text moderation service contextually analyzes complex content to detect offenses like bigotry, sexual advances or mental health issues. Depending on the potential violation that our AI detects (eg, sexual advances), platforms may elect to block certain messages while directing others to our live moderation team to further analyze the true intent. This means that words commonly used in gaming, such as “I’ll kill you,” can be more closely assessed to distinguish between competitive ‘trash talk’ and genuine threats.

“AI alone struggles with context,” Josh explains. “If a player types ‘I just shot myself’ into the chat in a first person shooter game, that’s very different from someone describing an attempted suicide. But you still need more context, and that’s where human review comes in.” WebPurify’s moderation system ensures that flagged messages are not reviewed in isolation; instead, human moderators will analyze the previous and subsequent messages in a conversation to determine the true intent.

What’s more, WebPurify can enable custom blocklists, allowing game developers to define their own moderation rules based on their audience. With multilingual support, WebPurify ensures chat moderation at a global scale, helping maintain inclusive and respectful player interactions across diverse communities.

Keeping live audio chat safe with transcription-based moderation

As voice communication becomes increasingly integral to multiplayer gaming, moderating live audio presents a unique challenge that many gaming platforms might not be equipped to deal with.

“Voice chat has more power than text because it’s more personal,” Josh says. “When someone hears something harmful spoken to them in real time, it hits harder than just reading words on a screen. Spoken words create a stronger connection between players, which means harmful comments will feel more impactful. That’s why moderating voice interactions is so important.”

Adding to this challenge is that, unlike text-based interactions, spoken words disappear the moment they’re said, making it difficult to track and enforce community guidelines. WebPurify’s transcription-based live chat moderation bridges this gap by converting voice chat into text in real time and running it through the same robust AI moderation filters used for chat.

By transcribing and analyzing live voice chats, WebPurify helps our partners in the gaming industry detect hate speech, harassment, and other violations before they have a chance to escalate.

Moderating in-game customization and virtual worlds

Customization has become a cornerstone of modern gaming, allowing players to design avatars and skins, as mentioned above, to custom weapons and even in-game environments. While this certainly enhances player engagement, it also opens the door for more abuse, as bad actors attempt to insert offensive, illegal, or inappropriate content into the game world.

WebPurify works with game developers to establish pre-approval filters and real-time moderation for their customized content. Whether it’s a player-designed T-shirt featuring hate speech or an offensive in-game sign, WebPurify’s moderation system identifies and removes this harmful content before it spreads.

“IP infringement is another big issue in gaming,” Josh points out. “Players might upload a celebrity’s face, a company’s logo, or even artwork from famous franchises. Platforms need to be aware that allowing this kind of content unchecked can lead to legal trouble. Our moderation tools help catch and remove these violations before they become a problem.”

“We’re the experts in your game.”

The primary element of game moderation is removing bad content, but there’s also a bigger picture to it all. “What people forget is that after logging thousands of hours moderating your community’s content, we’re experts in your game,” Josh explains. “We analyze our moderation trends and from this data we can provide insights that help shape better community guidelines.”

Content moderation can help guide your platform strategy. At WebPurify, we compile this data in a meaningful way, but also conduct quarterly roundtables with our moderation teams to ask essential questions like “What are the players’ biggest pain points?” or “How would you describe the culture of this game’s community?” We then present this intel to our clients, helping them make more informed decisions about their game features, moderation policies, identifying patterns of toxicity and refining community rules based on real data.

“Having access to this level of detail allows platforms to proactively address emerging issues,” Josh says. “It means you can stay ahead of potential threats and continue to improve the overall player experience.”

Game developers know that great experiences hinge on the symbiotic relationship between creative freedom and strong community safeguards. With its hybrid AI-human moderation system, WebPurify enables game studios to scale their UGC moderation without ever sacrificing accuracy.

For gaming platforms looking to build safer, more engaging experiences, WebPurify provides the tools, expertise, and real-time support to make it happen.