English Government’s Kid Portal Shares Name With Gay Porn Site

In what will surely turn out to be a major embarrassment for the English government, public sector information website Directgov decided to create a website dedicated to informing children of what’s happening with government through a “virtual environment that offers loads of fun games, exciting videos and cartoons” named Buster’s World.

The idea at first glance isn’t so bad, until you’ve come to the realization that Buster’s World shares its name with a gay porn fetish website. That’s right — we said it. What’s potentially most shocking about this is that if a child heads over to a search engine and types in “Buster’s World,” innocently looking for the UK-based ‘fun’ site, they’ll be greeted by ‘fun’ of another kind.

The story apparently surfaced after Twitter user More4Mums posted a somewhat-hilarious Tweet noting:

“6yr old tells me she was on Busters World at school – Googled to have a look OMG !!! Real link here”

From there, blogger Gordan MacIntyre-Kemp from TheDrum published the first report on the faux-pas. Swift response from the English Department of Children Schools and Families produced the following letter to MacIntyre-Kemp:

Dear Gordon,

Thanks for bringing this to our attention; we have acted urgently to sort this out. Here is our statement:

“The naming of this webpage was clearly a mistake and we regret that the supplier’s usual thorough checking procedures when creating web content seem to have failed. When this was brought to our attention we urgently took the site down, pending a rename, to avoid any further issues.

“The name concerned was new and had not yet been promoted widely to young people.

“The safety of children on the internet is of paramount importance and we will be looking at the procedures of our suppliers to ensure this does not happen again.”

Sadly (perhaps happily for others), the English government has teared town Buster’s World like the Berlin Wall, though Buster will be back along with his fun ‘games’ with a new name.

Incredible.

[ via TNW ]