I've determined that Safety Minder is preventing my child's favorite site, Club Penguin, from working.
With Safety Minder installed and active, we are unable to fully log into Club Penguin (www.clubpenguin.com). By "fully" I mean that we can get past log in screens but it times out trying to connect to the site. We ultimately get an error message from the site referencing an inability to log in.
I removed Safety Minder from my machine and was able to fully log into Club Penguin.
Thanks for responding and sorry it took so long for me to reply. I thought I would get an e-mail when someone replyed to my original post and didn't get a chance to check until today.
Interesting that you still have a problem when NSM was un-installed. Did you remove it completely or simply disable?
I have been able to replicate the problem multiple times by removing NSM completely and then having success logging into Club Penguin. When NSM is installed on the computer, I get the same error message - even when I'm logging in as the administrator.
One other thing I will try, at the suggestion of a tech savvy friend, is directly connecting my computer to the modem rather than through my router.
I've determined that Safety Minder is preventing my child's favorite site, Club Penguin, from working.
With Safety Minder installed and active, we are unable to fully log into Club Penguin (www.clubpenguin.com). By "fully" I mean that we can get past log in screens but it times out trying to connect to the site. We ultimately get an error message from the site referencing an inability to log in.
I removed Safety Minder from my machine and was able to fully log into Club Penguin.
Thanks for the update. Please let us know if you make it work.
I uninstalled Norton Safety Minder completely from my testing PC and also tried on another PC without Norton Safety Minder installed in the first place and still haven't been able to log onto my Club Penguin account.
Btw, you can change settings to get an email notification when someone answers your post in the forum. You can do that at My Settings -> Subscriptions & Bookmarks.
I have had this exact same problem with Club Penguin on the only computer that Online Family is installed on. Access to the site is "fully" allowed on two other computers that do not have Online Family installed. Also, I uninstalled Online Family from the computer in question, and it, too, allowed full access to the site. Within Online Family's settings, I have specifically allowed www.clubpenguin.com, I have also allowed "gaming" as a category.
So, I am convinced that there is something within Online Family / Safety Minder that is preventing full access to Club Penguin. Any Ideas?
I've been able to fully login and play on different servers on clubpenguin.com, with Norton Safety Minder installed. “Club Penguin” is classified as a "kids" site, rather than a "gaming" site, and at this point I'm skeptical that the Safety minder is blocking requests from the site.
So to clarify, after logging in, users cannot see the server list and connect? or they can connect, but are disconnected after logging into a specific server?
Can users try disabling Norton Safety Minder as opposed to uninstalling it, to see if the problem persists?
Since you can log in with Safety Minder installed, I understand your skepticism. However, please keep in mind that only when we fully uninstalled Safety Minder were we able to log into Club Penguin.
To answer your questions:
We can't see the server lists. So, we're not able to log in. When attempting to log in, the site displays the circling arrow and after some time we get an orange error box saying "Are you having trouble logging in"...or something to that effect.
As mentioned above, disabling the Safety Minder and/or disabling Norton Firewall does not solve the problem
Any chance you could reach out to the Club Penguin support people to see if they have any insight as to why that orange box appears after a certain amount of time?
We've been able to successfully reproduce the issue in house, and we are currently investigating the cause and drafting a solution.
Can you try using another browser besides Internet Explorer and see if you have the same problem? I was not able to reproduce the blocking issue with Firefox.
In my house I have two computers, one each for me and my daughter, both with eaxctly the same spec (Win 7, IE9, latest version of Flash).
NSM is installed only on my daughter's computer, and she has eaxctly the same issue as described above accessing CP. The home page works fine but when she tries to logon, the site takes a long time to repsond and then gives a connection error.
I have tried the following steps but with no success -
I have explicitly allowed all of the domain names for CP into NSM, and allowed all of the relevant catergories.
I have then set NSM to Monitor Only for my daughter.
If however, I uninstall NSM, CP works perfectly.
On my computer (without NSM) CP is fine.
My daughter also has a computer in another house, again with the same spec (Win 7, IE9, latest version of Flash) with NSM which I also manage under the same Norton account. The problem with CP is exactly the same on this computer.
The only obvious explanation is that when NSM is installed on a computer, it prevents CP from loading properly, even if NSM is not used for any filtering.
I hope that this information is useful in helping you resolve this issue.
I too would rsather not have my daughter use a different browser and hope that a resolution with NSM is possible.
Is there any update on this issue or an estimate of when we might see an update?
THis might seem like a trivial issue but this is my daughter's favorite website by far and I'm suffering a conflict between trying to keep her safe online and stopping her having fun in a very child-focussed and child-safe environment. It's also not giving her a very positive impression of Symantec..!
FYI - last night my daughter's computer prompted me to install an upgraded version of Norton Safety Minder. I allowed the installation to run and complete and then rebooted the computer but it made no difference to the problem with www.clubpenguin.com.
For testing, I also installed the latest version of Frirefox but the latest version of NSM isn't compatible with the latest version of Firefox and so was disabled by Firefox, thus entirely not a solution.
Could someone please provide an update on this issue. Is it being formally investigated and do you have a timescale for a resolution?
I sent the following e-mail to Club Penguin customer support this morning and will keep this thread posted of any reply. Jake perhaps you can send note as well.
I am the parent for (name removed) and this is the second message that I've sent on an issue we're having with Club Penguin. (My first message received no reply from you.)
We use Norton Safety Minder "NSM" (a Symantec product) to monitor and control our childrens' internet usage. It appears that the program is preventing us from accessing your servers. We have been working with Symantec support to ensure that all NSM settings allow access to the site.
We enter site and provide login information. The screen says "Logging in (name removed)" circlular arrows spin a few times then ultimately get hung up. After 15-20 seconds we receive an error message in an orange box that says "Having trouble logging in? Please try again or contact support if problem continues. [OK buttton] c0 (in bottom right corner of error box)"
This issue has been happening for months and we've made no progress with Symantec. There are others who have encountered same problem per Symantec site.
We're using Internet Explorer 9.
Could you provide any insight as to what is causing the problem?
Will you be willing to contact Symantec to resolve?