When my son turned 7 I bought him Minecraft. And it’s excellent. We set him up with a Microsoft account and put parental controls on it, time limit etc. I also walled off multiplayer somehow.
Now I wanted to try some LAN multiplayer, so I had to take off some of his restrictions and that’s when I fell into an incredibly frustrating rabbit hole that’s also like a bureaucratic hall of mirrors.
All of the links I click are either broken or lead to FAQs that do not offer working solutions.
I managed to find the controls for screen time restrictions, but the multiplayer restrictions are in another castle. Gaaaaah!
Anyway, wrestling this shit while an impatient kid keeps asking how long you’ll be to fix it is not my idea of a fun time. So here’s a hearty FUCK YOU to Microsoft for making this shit so obtuse. Somehow they shuffled the location of what restrictions are set where around. Very useful :(
Yup. And it’s not just MS. Of course you’re going to have to set permissions on every device; android, ios, game consoles, television, and they all have different and conflicting settings and terminology. And of course you can’t set it so the kids get a certain amount of total screen time per day, because if you give an hour of microsoft account time and an hour of android time, believe me the kid is going to go from one device to the next until they’ve run out of time on all of them and then ask for more.
And of course school is all online now, so good luck figuring out how to keep them from randomly surfing the web while they’re supposed to be in class. I specifically hate Google and YouTube. I would like to be able to restrict my kid to watching certain, approved channels. But you can’t do that, and even if you could, the kid could just sign out of their google account and watch whatever they wanted.
Welcome to MS family settings hell. I’ve been struggle with it for a couple of years. Today I discovered something new. My son asked me to install the Opera GX browser on his laptop (his gamer identity is very important to him these days). As soon as we launched it, windows popped a message saying he used his allocated time with Opera GX and needs to ask for more time from his parent. I never ever put any limitation on specific apps. Moreover, I actually deactivated time limits all together for the summer holiday time.
It took some tinkering and clicking useless links until I found a list of blocked browsers, which for some reason is under ‘Content restrictions’ and not lets say, under ‘App and game limits’:
This makes some sense if you think the average expectation for parents is to control their kids app usage as well as internet usage. Microsoft probably has some smartscreen stuff built into Edge but not other browsers, so…
Still, their parental control stuff needs so much work.
I actually pretty much understand and even like how the windows account part of the parental controls are done. The way I can set access to certain apps, restrict by URL etc. It’s fine.
But where the fuck did they hide the multiplayer settings? Oh that’s an entirely different account sir. How do I get there? Click this link sir. * .click. * gets thrown back to faq page. Fucking kafkaesque bullshit.
A few months back, I was vexed as I set up a laptop for my daughter, and Chrome simply would not launch. Took me a bit to realize it was because of the MS parental controls.
I’d be fine with it myself if I actually activated content restrictions, but I never did. I only enabled time restrictions, and have disabled them a long time ago.
The problem was made worse because my son’s laptop doesn’t show security alerts in some cases. It will just shut down any offending application. I scoured the internet for a long time trying to figure this out. I only figured it out when we set him up on another laptop, and that one gave me a proper message.
We have everything locked down. If her teacher wants her to watch a video or go to some website, she clicks on the link, and we get an email asking for permission for her to go that link. Great. (except sometimes [often] it doesn’t work and you have to grant permission three or four times before it sticks).
Except she can open a private browsing tab and watch youtube all day, no permissions required.
Anyone have experience with qustudio? My kids are tweens now and I think it’s time to make sure they don’t wander into bestiality porn or something on accident. I actually want a solution where I can whitelist more reasonable stuff for them to explore, while blocking the really bad stuff. When I was thirteen the only thing stopping me from getting really terrible stuff was bandwidth, lol, and curiosity is a normal thing. And yes, we’re going to talk openly about how porn should never, ever be modeled.
My 11-year old daughter figured out she could evade the parental controls on YouTube by pasting the YouTube link into a Google doc. Kinda proud of her tbh.
Pretty much every day I catch my daughter watching YouTube when she is supposed to be in class. Can’t seem to block it no matter what I do. And even if I could, teachers sometimes use YouTube videos, so I can’t block it from the router.
And then of course she yells at us for “distracting” her when we tell her she can’t watch YouTube during class.
