OS X El Capitan: Parental Controls NOT working

You are spot on. Parental Controls on Mac works only if you have a fresh installation of Mac OS X, and have not installed a single other non-Apple application. Reason being is that virtually all applications today install background services that ping various servers/websites (nothing nefarious; just the usual things apps must do to work properly, such as connect to AWS to poll various data, call home to authenticate registration, etc.). The Parental Control service then sees all of those pings simply as, "Your kid is trying to access http://adoberegistration.services.authentiocationservice224.com. Do you wish to allow?"

Adobe applications (Creative Cloud, e.g.) are notorious for this. They install at the root/admin level, so that even when your son, with a restricted account, logs in you will spend the next 20 minutes of your life authenticating with the "Always Allow..." dialog. And that only applies for that session. If he/she logs out and logs back in, you will repeat this nearly endless process.

Then have fun tracking down and disabling the guilty apps/services! If you're successful, the unintended consequence is that when you need to go do serious adult work in any Adobe app, all the necessary services will have been shut down.

Although this isn't necessarily Apple's fault, they sure don't provide any wizards/help in trying to make life any easier for you and your kid(s).

This is what I am running to at my job managing student computers. This, so far, has been the best explanation of what has been going on as we are trying to build a new image to base our next systems on. Thanks for the input!

Completely broken. Ironically it locks out Safari even when permitted but doesn't do anything to limit web sites.

Took the computers away from the boys and told their schools that they needed to provide manual homework until Apple fixes this.

I have the same

It is completely broken. I already called in and it was all the way up to engineering. But anyway, it is what it is for now.

same here... I have tried logging in & out several times, changing the settings but nothing ; it just does not work as expected! e.g. I disable "settings" for an account and once I logged in with the restricted account I could do what even I liked with no restrictions at all... please fix - this is serious !

Same here- parental lock doesn't kick in at the hour specified

Unfortunately I must fully agree: Parental Control seems inherently and completely broken. No setting whatsoever is stored.

Neither apps, nor websites, nor timing. It doesnt even generate log files. Since there hasn´t been released a patch for it, I start to think no one even cares. Is the group of parents using this very neat feature so little, that its not worse to bother?

Or am I missing something here?

It's true, the middle "bubble" won't move to "allow only specific websites." Same problem with OS X 10.11.2 beta. They haven't fixed it.

They say "millions" of people use this stuff and yet this software is released in a state such as this. This has got to be a joke and I'm so lame I just keep the joke going instead of just accepting that this is junk and walking away from a life of wasted time.

Brand new update-10.11.2- but it still doesn't work. I've left so much feedback. Everybody else that has the problem please leave feedback too! This problem needs to be fixed. I don't see 10.11.3 coming until around March though 😟.

Well, at least the kids are happy. For them it's like heaven on earth. Total anarchy. 😟

I want to add to the list of things that aren't working in Parental Control, under El Capitan:

If you go to the "Apps" tab of Parental Controls and a check the "Limit Applications on this Mac," you can check and un-check the apps you want your children to use or not. Unfortunately, this feature doesn't behave as expressed.

Once you have checked or un-checked the apps that you want to run/not-run, and begin testing you'll notice that you can this feature only blocked the 6-7 default programs (such as garageband etc), not the specific ones you tried to block. Tinkering with the available controls does not affect any change. It does not let you 'turn off' the apps you want.

I have the same problem

Same problems here