Club Penguin - ok to add buddies?

[chicaguapa]

DC are on Club Penguin and have a rule that they can only add buddies they know in RL. DD(9) has spoken to me about adding stranger buddies as sometimes another penguin will help her with something, ask to be her buddy and she feels bad/rude in declining them. We talked about how unsafe it could be adding someone you don't know and that it's good internet practice blah blah. But I also promised to look into it for her so that my decision one way or the other was an informed one. WWYD?

my DS1 has lots of buddies, all they seem to do is send each other postcards (there is a set of them you can choose from that say different things like "longtime no see etc) so they are not actually writing postcards themselves IYSWIM!). They can also visit other penguins' igloos and see their cool stuff. There are differnet safety levels, and I don't let my children use the option where they can type messages on screen. They can only send the set messages and emoticons. At one stage DS1 DID have the least secure setting and someone obviously guessed his password and logged on as him, said lots of rude things and got reported pretty quickly! (definitely was not him as happened in the middle of the night)