As a theme park fan, VMK had a HUGE influence on me (as well as Club Penguin, which I started playing pre-Disney acquisition) -- I run an online community now (in the form of a Minecraft server) and we still take gameplay inspiration from the virtual worlds we grew up playing.
...that being said, I just blacklist words and don't do any smart detection at all, lest I succumb to the Scunthorpe problem. I back that up with a pretty sizable dedicated chat moderation team, of course. But since we max out at ~100 concurrent players, it isn't as huge of a deal for it to scale (miscreants find their way into Discord DM's, unfortunately).
Scale is really where things start. Small communities can be taken care of, and frankly they tend to be more fun. Big ones go off the rails quick as more things have to be automated and delegated.
100% agreed on small communities being more fun. One of the worst times to moderate the server was when a YouTuber known for troll-y content made a video with his friends. The video was really funny, but his fans kept logging on for MONTHS bringing a similar borderline-trolling energy. It was rough.
Our community EXPLODED after some viral TikToks in March 2020, and for the first time in almost a decade we had to start implementing new guards against bad behavior at scale (automatically muting new accounts that join with VPN's, for example). Luckily that's mostly died down, and only the good-faith folks have stuck around!
...that being said, I just blacklist words and don't do any smart detection at all, lest I succumb to the Scunthorpe problem. I back that up with a pretty sizable dedicated chat moderation team, of course. But since we max out at ~100 concurrent players, it isn't as huge of a deal for it to scale (miscreants find their way into Discord DM's, unfortunately).