Wrong notifications when two users logged in

Hi all,

 

I'm using Online Family on my Windows 7 x64 machine. My own account stays open and my kid switches to her account (I think this is called Fast User Switching in the Microsoft world).

 

Here comes the fun: she starts getting popups all over the place because MY account (remember, still open) accesses Yahoo Mail or Facebook or whatnot. And boy does she gets a lot of those, because I have some mail/message notification plugins in MY browser checking for those emails... And wait there's more of it: I get also my email inbox hammered with zillions of notification emails as if my daughter would be visiting every minute yahoo.com. This of course fills also the online account history with white noise, rendering it totally unusable.

 

This is VERY annoying. The only workaround, and it's a very unsatisfactory one, is to log myself out each time she wants in. But of course remotely accessing the computer starts the same hullabaloo...

 

1. The "family" local component has a BUG: it is unable to differentiate between account A and account B. Sounds ridiculous but there it is.

 

2. These popups which many people including me keep complaining about need badly to be addressed. This is way more than a simple nice-to-have, this is a real hassle for my kid - especially while the popups are for us blatantly wrong. YOU try to play a full-screen game in another resolution while Norton keeps popping up puppy pictures, and you'll understand immediately what I mean. And yeah you could add the way to just disable them when some other program has full screen - like the Norton Antivirus component already can do.

 

Thank you for listening,

Mario

Hi all,

 

I'm using Online Family on my Windows 7 x64 machine. My own account stays open and my kid switches to her account (I think this is called Fast User Switching in the Microsoft world).

 

Here comes the fun: she starts getting popups all over the place because MY account (remember, still open) accesses Yahoo Mail or Facebook or whatnot. And boy does she gets a lot of those, because I have some mail/message notification plugins in MY browser checking for those emails... And wait there's more of it: I get also my email inbox hammered with zillions of notification emails as if my daughter would be visiting every minute yahoo.com. This of course fills also the online account history with white noise, rendering it totally unusable.

 

This is VERY annoying. The only workaround, and it's a very unsatisfactory one, is to log myself out each time she wants in. But of course remotely accessing the computer starts the same hullabaloo...

 

1. The "family" local component has a BUG: it is unable to differentiate between account A and account B. Sounds ridiculous but there it is.

 

2. These popups which many people including me keep complaining about need badly to be addressed. This is way more than a simple nice-to-have, this is a real hassle for my kid - especially while the popups are for us blatantly wrong. YOU try to play a full-screen game in another resolution while Norton keeps popping up puppy pictures, and you'll understand immediately what I mean. And yeah you could add the way to just disable them when some other program has full screen - like the Norton Antivirus component already can do.

 

Thank you for listening,

Mario

Can you identify what browser plugins you are using to check your yahoo and facebook accounts?

 

Can you confirm that they are not loaded in the child's browser?

 

 

Hi all,

 

to your questions:

 

- I can confirm that the kid has no such extensions loaded. Anyway Firefox doesn't even have the possibility to load global extensions. I use for myself WebMail Notifier:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/webmail-notifier/

 

- I have no idea what Norton Safety Minder is - I use the German version where the name was probably creatively changed. The 2 icons I have are called Norton Begleiter (version 2.1.0.37, with Norton Online version 2.1.0.21) and the Norton Internet Security which has no Help/About link whatsoever or any such visible version information.

 

- There are also no RSS Feeds around as far I can tell (and if yes, they would be in some browser I guess, or not?)

 

- my account is not watched (would there be a problem if 2 watched accounts are logged in simultaneously?)

 

Hope this sheds some light :)

 

Thank you,

Mario

Thanks for the response. 'Norton Safety Minder' is the english name, and you have the most recent version installed.

 

So what you are describing does not sound normal, and there may be a problem here.

 

It is possible to have two accounts logged in, and have two separate sets of rules be enforced at the same time. However, usually the user session must be active in order for the behavior that you describe to take place, meaning that you have to be the active session in order for the browser plugins to make requests.

 

We are investigating this now to see if we can understand this problem better.  it would be helpful to know the following items:

 

1)  What web categories you have selected to prevent the child from accessing... or more specifically, what categories are sending the notifications, both in the pop up alerts and the emails you recieve?

 

Thanks again for notifiying us.

 

 

 

 

 

Thank you for bearing with me :) I just took the default Online settings for her age (9). Thus I can't say exactly what is blocked but the popup mentions for example "Webmail" for Yahoo.

 

What I can say however is that with "fast user switch" the other user session will always stay active - I can let for example the music player running and playing while she does stuff in her account, or she lets Firefox open in some music website which then annoys me when I switch back. So if you say that the problem behaviour happens only when a session is active, it means it will happen ALL the time... was I the first user ever using this FUS? I though it exists since XP...

So we've identified the source of the problem and we are currently working to find a solution. It does appear that the requests from the webmail notifier are not being tracked back to the the correct user session.

 

That doesn't really help your situation, so in the meantime I'd like to offer some possible optional alternatives to help assist with the problem:

 

Go to the 'Web Settings' area for the child and add the domains of your webmail accounts to the 'list of allowed sites' (Mail.yahoo.com for instance) -If you child does visit these sites, they  will still be monitored, but they won't trigger pop-ups or email notifications.

 

Additionally, you may

 

Go the the 'Notification Settings'  for the child and uncheck the option to send email when a child visits a blocked site. Since you may already be reviewing your child's activity regularly, you may not need this notification as much as other parents. Also, adding the webmail sites to the allowed addresses list as described above will eleminate these uneccesary notificaitons. 

 

Another Alternative would be to

 

Go the the 'Web Settings' for the child and uncheck the "Web Mail" category.

 

This is all dependent on the rules that you define. I'd reccommend reviewing the categories and notification settings to help reduce the noise and popups while we work on resolving this problem.

 

Thanks,

 

Yeah I think I will have to allow her "mail.yahoo.com" - for a while at least. However this doesn't make me very comfortable.

Is there a way I could know when this issue gets fixed, so I can revert to the safe settings? Some incident tracking, notification or whatever?

 

And secondly, how about the suggestion to offer disabling the popups or hide them when a program has fullscreen? Is there a way to know whether the suggestion is taken seriously, and taken into account, and worked on, and delivered?

 

Thanks a lot,

M

Has there been any progress on solving these issues related to user-switching ? I’m using WinXP with user switching, and when my daughters daily time limit is up, she is not logged out, but the computer returns to the user selection screen. She then logs back in and can continue for another minute before this process repeats over and over again. She seems to be able to do this an unlimited number of times, so rendering the whole point of this time limiting as useless. Thanks for any help to solve this Andrew

Hi AndrewSmart,

 

Could you check to see what version of Norton Safety Minder on the PC? 

 

You can find the version of Norton Safety minder by clicking the Norton Safety Minder icon and selecting About Norton Safety Minder in the System Tray.

 

 

Thanks,

Katie

Whilst I appreciate your offer to pursue which version I have installed etc, I have seen from many other threads on this forum that these type of questions tend to end up at a dead end. My main question was regarding what progress has been made in solving the issues reported in the earlier posts in this thread regarding compatibility with fast user switching, because I’m fairly certain my issue falls in line with what other users have experienced already with this. This seems to be a fundamental flaw in the software product and I can’t believe that the issue hasn’t been solved in several months.

AndrewSmart,

 

Please check the response at  http://community.norton.com/t5/Norton-Online-Family/Safety-minder-allow-login-after-curfew-or-daily-time-limit/td-p/399550/page/3

 

 

Thanks,

Katie