As a mother of both teenagers and preteens and a long-time internet user, I like to keep up to date on the various social networking sites around – even though I’m not strictly a fan of them myself.  I hate myspace with a passion you wouldn’t believe (although I do believe I have an account there somewhere, but I couldn’t tell you what the details of it are!)  I do use Facebook daily, as it’s a great way to keep in touch with family and old friends who I rarely see.  For both Facebook and MySpace there is a minimum age of 13 for registering an account and if, like me, you have children under 13 who are more intelligent than they should be then this becomes a problem.

On the one hand, I don’t want my children being in a position where they could come into contact with the more unsavoury types that lurk around social networking sites, but on the other I don’t want them not having internet access or experience in the social networking phenomena.  I firmly believe that my children should have a good knowledge of the net, how it works, what’s available and the potential risks involved.  My eldest daughter is 7 (going on 20!) and she often badgers me to allow her on Facebook.  I know a few family members have botched their children’s ages so they can have their own accounts but that’s not something I’m comfortable doing.  Facebook has a minimum age of 13 and so that, in my eyes, tells me that they are not in a position to keep safe children under that age.  As a compromise I allow her to use my Facebook account to play the games (Farmville, Farm Town, Cafe World and whatever else she plays) and talk to family.  I also monitor what she clicks while she’s on there.

This got me to wondering what facilities are avialable for children who are more than ready to get to grips with social networking and the internet but aren’t at the age where they can legally use a lot of the sites around and so, armed with the trusty Google, I went on a quest to find some sites that my children can safely use and socialise on.

Here are my findings, which I hope will be of some use to any other parents out there.

Habbo

Habbo seems to have the largest memberbase that I can see – with over 135 million users, so we’ll take a look at that one first.

Upon opening the site you’re greeted with a black background with a centre image of what looks like a hotel, below this you are given the greeting “In Habbo Hotel you can make and meet friends.” – so yes, that confirms it’s a hotel!  Haboo is owned by the Sulake Corporation who, according to their blurb, are an online entertainment company focused on virtual worlds.  They also own a site called Babbo Bar – which is another virtual community for older people but back to Habbo.  Habbo appears to be targetted toward teens, rather than pre-teens.  On their main page there is a clear link to safety tips, and a decent Parents Guide which covers everything to set a parent’s mind at ease.

Habbo is free to register and play in but also has premium options available for purchasing furniture or a subscription to the Habbo Club which makes more options available.  I am a little wary of their methods of purchasing credits – which range from credit/debit card through to sending a text message or dialing a premium number from a landline.  These do not make me comfortable as it’s very easy for a child to run up an unexpected bill this way.  Apparently there is a limit on how much is spent, but I still don’t think making such an easy way of buying credits available to children is advisable.  Luckily for me, Habbo is for children of 12 or over!

Poptropica

Up next with over 76 million users, is Poptropica.

The homepage of Poptropica is blue… so very blue!  And there isn’t really any visual indication as to what the site is about.  There is no clear link to a Parent’s Guide, so FAQs is likely the next best thing.  How wrong am I!  The FAQs don’t give any information for parents, but do explain that Poptropica is  “a virtual online world in which kids can travel, play games, customize their character, compete in head-to-head competition, and communicate safely with each other.” It also states that Poptropica was developed by Family Education Network, which is a division of Pearson.  That’s not bad, as the Family Education Network focuses quite a lot on children so one can assume that their safety measures are good.  Incidently another good site that belongs to them is FunBrain (but it’s not social networking so we won’t go into that one here.)

The targetted ages appear to be 6 through to 15 which makes this one idea for my oldest daughter.

Like Habbo, Poptropica is free to register and play on, with the added facilty to purchase credits for use on the site and there is also the opportunity get free credits through playing the various games.

Poptropica also has a very nice blog which gives screenshots, insights and all sorts of information about the game.

Neopets

Unless you live on Mars, Neopets doesn’t need any explanations.  It’s been around a long time and I remember our teenage boys playing on there a lot when they were younger (and hadn’t discovered Facebook and xbox live!).   I am surprised that they’re not at the top, but they still have over 54 million users.

I’ve never been a big fan of Neopets, but you can’t fault their homepage or their Parent information.    Their homepage is a blaze of colour and action with things happening and popping all over the place.    For parents, their links to their Safety Tips and Privacy Policy are clearly visible.  It’s free to play, and again (which seems to be the standard nowadays) there’s also the option to purchase additional item.s

StarDoll

StarDoll is aimed towards the girls (obviously) and, not being especially girly myself, I find it very unappealing in its pink and fashion-focused style but I’m sure most girls will love it.  At Stardoll, girls can make and dress up dolls – fulfilling that fashion thing that they seem to love so much and with over 34 million users, I’m sure they will find others on there who they can share fashion tips with.

StarDoll is targetted at the 7-17 age range and has its Parent Information clearly available via its home page.  This will be another one my daughter will have a go at.  StarDoll is the first one I’ve seen that shows two privacy policies – one aimed at adults and another called the Kids Privacy Policy.  This definitely made me feel that they had my children’s safety as one of their foremost concerns.

Club Penguin

Club Penguin just makes me smile.  I think it’s the penguins all over the homepage that does it… or maybe it’s seeing the subtle Disney sign in the topleft corner, which just makes you confident that the people behind the site know what they’re doing.  The homepage has a very appealing design, full of cartoon penguins and the Parents Guide is extremely visible as one of the large boxes on the bottom right.  I think of all the sites I’ve spotted, this is the one I’m happiest with my kids using and will likely not only allow my 7 year old, but also the 5 (almost 6) year old to use it too.

Again, like the others there are both free and purchase options available.  And the membership prices are not at all bad prices.  If my kids use it enough, I will consider purchasing memberships for them.  There’s just something extremely friendly about the site and surprisingly there’s only around 28 million users so far – making this one of the less populated social networking sites out of this list.

Free Realms

Free Realms is a fairly new game and my two eldest daughters have been playing it for a short while already.  The Parent’s Guide is in a visible position at the top of the home page and covers everything you need to know.  There is the typical free and purchase options.  The game is very similar to the likes of World of Warcraft (but without the violence!)  It’s nicely put together, with the ability for characters to perform tasks, gain abilities, pets and many other things.  They can design their character and the things they can do appears to be linked directly to their age – so my 7 year old can only use present words/sentences when talking with other members – but older children would have the ability to write their own conversations.

So far they only have around 4 million users but I’m sure this will rise considerably as the word gets out.

Moshi Monsters

The last on my list at present is called Moshi Monsters and has a userbase of approx 2 million.  Their homepage is colourful and easy on the eye with Parents Information being clearly visible at the bottom left of the centre image.  This covers everything you need to know about what your child is able to do on the site and as per the others they also offer free and purchase versions at prices that seem fairly reasonable.

The concept appears to be that your child adopts a monster and then plays games, etc while on the site, so I’m sure a lot of kids will find this interesting and fun. I know my own little monsters are wanting to give it a try.

This brings me to the end of this blog post.  My two girls have happily agreed to act as guineapigs for some of the sites I’ve listed – StarDolls, Moshi Monsters, Club Penguin and Free Realms – and have said they will give them a play and let me know what they think for a future blog post.

Feel free to share your own thoughts – or let me know of any other social networking sites out there specifically for kids.

Popularity: 37% [?]

I’ve been involved in forums since around 2000, when I discovered the ezboard community by sheer accident.  I was looking for a particular poem that I’d read and couldn’t remember the author of and ran a search through google.  A link appeared which caught my attention so I clicked it and it took me a forum which, to my regret, I no longer remember the name of.  I was fascinated.  Here was a place where people interacted with each other, shared their writing, gave constructive criticisms and connected with likeminded people.  I’d never seen such a thing before.

When I built my first forum – and yes, I did so on the ezboard network (which has since been bought out by Yuku) – I had absolutely no idea what I was doing and simply made it up as I went along.  I explored other forums, checking out how they had things set up, what kind of rules they had in place and connected with other people who ran them -  finally discovering they were known as Forum Administrators.  Yes, I really was that innocent!

Looking back now, I laugh at my naivety but there are still people like that, who’ve never seen, used or even know what a community forum is all about.  That original forum I built is actually still there – available on ezboard/yuku for those who know where to look.  After a few years, I archived the majority of the posts, but there’s still some available in public and I’ll occasionally go for a walk down memory lane and read through some of the posts on there.  I wish I hadn’t lost contact with a lot of the members I had there – they were a very good bunch of people and I never had any of the problems that seem to plague present day adminstrators.

Moving forward a couple of years, I’d decided to build a forum for another subject and had purchased vBulletin for the first time.   I had been struggling to install the software – not knowing much about FTPs, Uploading, Hosts, etc and was in dire need of help and so I ran a google search for “forum administrators”.  There was nothing available and so I had to teach myself what I was doing and, boy, it wasn’t easy!

Nowadays, we’re surrounded by people willing to help us.  In February 2004 I discovered The Admin Zone - and as it says in its tagline, for me it really is the no.1 resource for community administrators.  I registered and explored, reading everything I could and learning things that I hadn’t even considered – it actually made me realise just how little I knew.

Now I’m an administrator on that forum – and have been (on and off) for several years.  I rarely frequent any other admin-related forum, although I do occasionally go and say hello.  I think I’ve been there for so long now, I just feel like part of the furniture

So why not pop over and say hello

Popularity: 2% [?]

It’s a sad day when a man like Stephen Fry (@stephenfry)  feels he has to leave a social networking site because of the way he treated by someone else.  I don’t know Stephen personally, but I do follow his regular tweets on Twitter and enjoy the random things he shares with his followers.  The people who follow him range from other celebrities, like the fabulous Derren Brown (@derrenbrown), to nobodies like myself!

Stephen posted a short twitter earlier this afternoon saying

Think I may have to give up on Twitter. Too much aggression and unkindness around. Pity. Well, it’s been fun.

Of course, most people who saw the tweet responded by begging Stephen not to leave and a short while later he did respond with:

Well maybe I’ll see how I feel in a few days. Very low and depressed at the moment and any drop of meanness makes it so much worse. Sorry.

Of course, being the nosy sort I had to track down the source of Stephen’s upset and I did discover a remark by someone called @brumplum saying

@stephenfry I shall have to put more effort into fluid-extraction! *blushes at the thought of S.F. reading my wibbles*

This was closely followed by

My life is complete, @stephenfry has @ replied me, rapidly followed by blocking me. My previous comment clearly hit him hard. Sorry.

I’m unsure whether I’ve missed a comment in between somewhere as Stephen replied to this person but I can’t the original comment he responded to.

Either way, if Stephen does leave Twitter, it will be a sad day as his comments do brighten up the twitterverse and he would be sadly missed.

Please don’t leave, Stephen!

Popularity: 2% [?]

There’s been so much negative information being bandied around about vBulletin/Internet Brands of late that I felt I would add my voice and revisit my initial post regarding the upgrade to vB4.

In an article posted by The Register, which to be honest I really begrudge linking to but without it my following comments won’t make much sense, it was claimed that IB has banned multiple paying customers from their support forums.  Granted, that was true, but the slant put on this article was that because they were banned from the forum (for ranting, abusing and generally being pains in the arses all ove r the place) they were not, at any time, banned from using the Support Ticket system which is the official means for getting support for a vBulletin forum.

The Register claimed that they contacted vB’s GM, Ray Morgan, who didn’t bother replying to them.  What they fail to add there is that they didn’t give him long to actually formulate a response to the claims being made and, you’d think, being a so-called reporting site, they would understand that you can’t just fire off replies without first taking in what’s being said.  There was absolutely nothing inexplicable about the bannings.   It was quite obvious the reasons behind the bannings was due to the amount of disruption these particular customers were causing on the forum.  So trying to paint these people as innocent is completely and utterly wrong.  They also quoted figures relating to the fees charged by vB and are inaccurate about them too.  The actual pricing can be found HERE.

It amused me that The Register didn’t even bother to try and see the other side of things.  They could have contacted any number of happy vB customers for the alternative view of the way things are going.  But that wouldn’t have achieved the response they wanted at all, of course, but I’m pretty sure they’ll be disappointed anyway as they’ve really done nothing more than make the majority of vB customers look derisively upon their article and the “anonymous” people who’ve complained to them.

Moving on from the idiocy above, IB released vB4 beta 1 on their own forum a week ago.  There was quite a lengthy downtime while they ensured everything was working correct and, as is the norm, there was a multitude of rumours flying around over the reasons behind it.  I won’t claim to know what was going on behind the scenes, but once the forum came back online everything was in place.

It’s actually been nice watching the changes that have been made to the forum over the past week in response to comments/suggestions from the customers using the support forums.  And who’d have believed a single week could have evolved vB4 to such a large extent.

I’ve been lucky enough to be a part of the alpha/beta team and, while I cannot talk about what I know or have seen away from what’s visible on the forums currently, I would like to see it’s been an exciting time and I’m confident that there are good things to come!

My support stays with vB/IB and Ray Morgan and while I do think some situations could (and should) have been handled differently, I am of the view that IB is genuine in wanting vBulletin to remain the best forum software available and that the mistakes that have been made, have been done so because they are still finding their feet.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m looking forward to running vB4 on my forums.

Popularity: 100% [?]

If you’ve turned up here looking for the random musings that I write – then you need to go over to Whimpulsive where my personal random thoughts reside!  From today (well, last week actually, as that’s when I put Azhrialilu dot Com back online) this site concerns itself with all things computer related  if that’s to your tastes, I’ll be happy to see you stick around

Popularity: 8% [?]

It took 2 months to write and proofread and now it’s finally been released.  The vBulletin Bible eBook covers all aspects of installing a vBulletin onto your website.  With full descriptive details on the whole Admin Control Panel and forumside, it leaves you with a good understanding of what all the functions available mean and do.  The vBulletin Bible eBook also has a forum dedicated to its content and offers book purchasers a full range of tutorials to take them through everything painlessly step by step, with a dedicated staff who are happy to help with any problems.

Why not purchase a copy of the book here today where we currently have it on offer as a downloadable ebook.

Popularity: 27% [?]