Parental Control Issues

Same problems here, and more - it also messes up my dashboard when parental controls are enabled.

Also, it will not change the apple home page when safari boots up, even if apple is not in the list of allowed sites... and it keeps adding apple in the list of allowed sites, even after I repeatedly remove that site!

I resolved some of these issues by turning off parental control for the child, going in his account, changing the home page for Safari, then enabling parental controls back...

This feature is clearly not yet ready.

This feature is buggy: I enabled time restrictions, but disabled content restrictions for web access. However, content restrictions are still enforced.
Content restrictions are unusable, too many false positives, too restrictive for european standards.

Don't want to intrude into a thread. I posted some other problems in 'using Leopard'. In my case, again on a managed user, it started off by restricting sites even though no content restrictions had been put in force. The boxes said all sites. It allows some pages on a site then says "Oops.." really it does that then you cant get any pages on that site even when changing the page specific url.
The landing failures have no rhyme or reason to them. Another time you get a page forbidden earlier. It also misbehaves with regard to applications allowed. I started off with some restrictions before upgrading and several days ago tried allowing all apps. I took little notice. I still get 'allow once/allow always' prompts. Choosing allow once I get an authentication dialogue and it then refers to something called disk management (this one was on attempting to use Disk Utility which had been 'allowed' in my general permission)!
So far 'time restrictions ' have not acted up in my case.

I found another weird one involving Simple Finder not working if the application is in a folder within Applications. I blogged about it on our user group web site.

http://www.siriusmug.com/index.php/2007/11/03/leopard-parental-controls-simple-f inder-bug/

One problem I have noticed is that alot of the interactive children sites my son likes (webkinz for example) use forwarders that are just ip addresses and there can any number of those for load balancing from 2 to 10 once you log in. This seems to cause serious problems when using the "Allow access only to these websites" option. My first problem is that there is no way to allow a range or CIDR netblock of IP's the second is that even if you only allow one IP it will still fail if it does not have a dns name associated with the IP as the webkinz example does. The only way I was able to get it to work was to give each IP a name in my /etc/hosts file and point the parental controls at that name instead of the IP.

I installed Leopard on my kids' machine last night and am having the exact same problem with Webkinz. All of the other bookmarks transferred just fine, but anything with an IP address is invalid and can't be successfully added to the list.

BUT, I hadn't thought of adding them to my hosts file, so thanks for that work around at least.

I'm having the same issues. However being a new Mac user (less than 30 days old...) I'm hoping someone can give me a little more help on how to add to the hosts file. I haven't used Unix in over 20 years!

Parental controls have been messing with my dashboard too. I've done some very time consuming testing with this and spent 3 hours talking to Apple support and I'm absolutely certain that this dashboard thing is related to parental controls even though just saying that sounds kind of ridiculous. I hope the next update solves this problem.

To define the dashboard problem more clearly, it won't open any widgets except the 'manage widgets' (but I don't think that counts really).

Right now my only solution to fix the dashboard is to disable parental controls and do a "Archive Install," which takes about 2 hours.

I really want the parental controls feature, but I'm not sure if I'm willing to give up my dashboard for it.

I am having the same issue. Working with my daughter's managed account we were trying to add a website. I entered my admin password and continued to be directed to the "Oops" page. I then switched over to the Admin account and went into parental controls. I found 4 entries for the website I was trying to add in the "Allow access to only these sites" list since I had tried multiple times from the managed acct. Still, I specifically typed in the domain I was trying to add and deleted the other entries. When I went back to the managed account it again did not work. Don't know what's going on.

I agree this worked well in Tiger. It is difficult enough to explain to my kids (especially the older ones) why they can't just go to any website. Having the ability to add sites not work smoothly just compounds the issue.

Looking for any ideas.

I applied 10.5.1 on my MBP and it went from a partial lock down (no sub domains) to a full lock down (no internet access).

After setting up parental control for an account with all programs available, the account is not able to connect to the internet. When Safari is selected it opens but showing no server. Any thoughts on why or how to fix. Strangely on my office iMac another Alum. iMac 20" this problem does not occur.

skidave1 wrote:
After setting up parental control for an account with all programs available, the account is not able to connect to the internet. When Safari is selected it opens but showing no server. Any thoughts on why or how to fix. Strangely on my office iMac another Alum. iMac 20" this problem does not occur.

Did you by chance install Rosetta Stone SMS? My Parental Controls worked a little bit/sort of until I installed the "network" student management system. Now I am in total lock down. I have some access on my Mini with no SMS installed. FWIW, the SMS uses 127.0.0.1 to hook up the client language program to its student database.

AnnEarl wrote:
Did you by chance install Rosetta Stone SMS?

I'm having the exact same problem on an iMac that I upgraded to Leopard. I do have Rosetta Stone installed with the SMS. I just figured it was a Leopard problem but I guess I'll have to try it on some other machines and see. Have you tried removing Rosetta's SMS and, if so, did it make a difference?