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Parental Control

Posted: Thu May 04, 2006 11:04 pm
by s.dot
I want to offer the ability for parents to limit access to my site to their children, if they so wish.

Is there already a piece of software that can be configured to do this? If I had to write an application would it be possible to do?

Thoughts, ideas, opinions?

Posted: Fri May 05, 2006 9:53 am
by santosj
This is a very interesting concept. The only issue would be that you would have to have some way to confirm that the person who says they are the parent is actually a parent of the child.

It would also be somewhat difficult unless they are under 13 and you require a parents email address. You could also get the parent to email you and set the user account up under the parent.

If you did have such a panel, then it should not give any indication to the user that they are under the parent controls. For security, you would have to confirm that the parent's email is the child's parents email. You don't have to give away that they would be giving up some control, just to confirm that the parents email is a known parent's email.

You would probably have to still create the parent's control panel to control different parts of the web site. This however would be cool, but I don't really see an real world application behind it.

If you are creating a childs web site, it is going to be different than one for a preteen, or teen, or adult. You would automatically allow or disallow different content based on those age groups.

However if you had a site that allowed for interaction with all of the age groups, then you would want to keep children away from adults automatically. Based on the age of the person, you could center the site around what the normal site for that age group would be and allow.

You could also allow for parents to contact you easily, so that you could work out other details with them.

Re: Parental Control

Posted: Fri May 05, 2006 2:01 pm
by Christopher
I think you only options are to blacklist from one direction or the other, or require an account. If the had a fixed IP address, I suppose they could register with you and you would block them.