I am using to Safety Minder to (remotely, I don't live with parents any more) watch over my small brother. Useful too, but often frustrating..
It often takes long to allow blocked pages to update to allowed. Basically when I add some site to allowed list, Safety Minder doesn't get new settings immediately even when house rules are updated manually (from tray menu). Why is it so??
This forces me to either remotely disable Safety Minder or download some files on my pc and send through Skype etc.. It annoys me for a long time, and finally it made me to create a profile in this forum and complain...
What Operating System(s) and Service Pack(s) are running on the PC(s)?
You can find it by going to Start -> Control Panel -> System and Security (or System). If you don't have any service pack installed, you won't see anything on the page.
You mentioned it doesn't make an effect right away updating house rules manually from tray menu. Does it happen every time when you try? How long does it generally take to have the rules updated?
In my experience it seems like it has been like that always (slow updates) and eventually I just got sick of it... Usually it takes 2-5 minutes to update even though manual updates ar atempted once every 30 s.
Have been using safety minder for about a year an a half. The computer has been reinstalled once during this period (in case you wanted to suggest to reinstall Safety Minder).
And now I remembered another annoyance related to this. When some page is blocked and my brother sends a request to unblock (that pop up baloon dialogue), it also takes ~5 minutes to show up in Online Family web control.
So, imagine, my brother tries to download something from a site which appears to be blocked. To unblock it properly and coneniently can take up to 5-10 minutes (wondering what's wrong and retrying the same thing). So most of the time I end up downloading whatever he needs myself and send it through Skype. Not very convenient workflow as you can imagine...
Thanks for the update. What browser and version do you use to change the settings online?
You mentioned "...even though manual updates ar atempted once every 30s..." If I understand correctly, are you saying you or the child clicks on the "Update House Rules" option in the system tray every 30 seconds?
I'll pass the issue to the team, and we will try to reproduce it.
I probably misunderstood something, is there any reason you need to click on the Update House Rules option every 30 seconds? Normally, you don't need to do it, after the house rules get changed, you or the child only needs to elect the option once to make the changes get affected immediately.
Of course I also would expect the updated rules to be applied immediately. But what do you do when it doesn't work - try again!
I got similar unblocking problem today. In this case it was caused by confusion. So my brother tried to download a file from mediafire.com which was blocked. So he send an unblocking request. But I couldn't see it anywhere, just in Activity->Alerts section I saw that he tried to access:
7/29/12 12:15 PM : Blocked Web site: [File Sharing]
7/29/12 12:13 PM : Blocked Web site: [File Sharing]
Where can I see those unblocking requests? Few months before you had different interface in the Online Family website where Activity and Settings where not as separate as they are now. I remember I could see them somewhere in that interface. Also I used to receive a request to my email.
I checked all the tabs in Activy and Settings sections and could no see requests anywhere. So I just unblocked the blocked site visible above. But my brother still couldn't download the file. That was because mediafire redirects him to different servers all the time. So he then sent me the full link and I unblocked it:
And then indeed house rules were updated quickly. So maybe all the problems we experienced were caused by confusion due missing requests (can't see the exact request with message why he wants it unblocked) and the fact that redirected servers are being blocked. And then I end up unblocking something that seems to match what he wanted from the blocked alert list.
[edit: removed links to downloads per the Participation Guidelines and Terms of Service. Please communicate this sensitive information via Private Message upon request.]
Thanks for the update. Do you receive any emails at all when the child tries to visit a blocked website (not a request email to be able to visit the website)?
Sorry for late responses, but I'm kind of buys. I rember about Norton issues when I'm disappointed yet another time.
I enabled notifications at "Settings -> Notify -> Web Content -> When visits blocked site" but I don't receive anything. I do see in the Activity log that blocked web site has been visited.
Thanks for the post. Can you please add another email address to the “Send email notifications to” list at Settings -> Notify, like a yahoo account. If you don’t have it, please create one. It’s free. So you can see if you get the alerts right away or not.
Ok, there is no need add another email because I am receiving notifications now. I didn't receive them right after I changed notification settings to inform about blocked site visits for at least 5-10 min. Not sure at which point I started receiving them.
In general I do not want to be inform about all these blocked site visits because often web sites contain images located on blocked servers and generates unimportant notifications. I am only interested in requests to enable some blocked sites. Now I do receive them. Can you separate requests and general notifications?
Another annoyance. Yes, now I receive blocked site notifications. Then of course I go and log into the online family web site, but Alert log isn't up to date. It's already 10 minutes since I received notifications to my email, but I still don't see them in the Alert section. Last alerts are from yesterday. Why is it so? This causes confusion and I don't have ability to simply enable the site by clicking on the "allow .." link, I have to add exception manually.