Using FamZoo with Parental Controls

Many of our families use some form of parental control software to help ensure a safe browsing experience for their kids. The most common examples include Safe Eyes and Mac Parental Controls. In some cases, you’ll need to explicitly enable access to more than just the main FamZoo site to get things to work properly. For example, you may notice that your kids cannot check off items on their checklists when the parental controls are in force. If you’re seeing problems, try adding each of the following web addresses to your list of explicitly enabled sites:

• www.famzoo.com - this is where our public pages (like our home page) reside.
• app.famzoo.com - this is where our private application pages (like your family’s Overview page) reside.
• ajax.googleapis.com - we rely on some nerdy external files (javascript libraries, CSS files, etc.) to run our application. The files come from this Google server.
• 1e100.net - similar to the entry just above, it turns out this is also a Google address. (Talk about nerdy, the name refers to the scientific notation for a “googol” which is 1 followed by a hundred zeros. For the super curious, you can find more info on how Google uses this domain here.)
• www.google-analytics.com - we use the Google Analytics service to keep stats on which pages in our application are being used most frequently. Its files come from this server.

Note that if you sign into FamZoo as a parent, we’ll often show our latest FamZoo Facebook activity in the right hand side bar. (We never show it to kids who are signed into FamZoo.) Usually, the sidebar item will just show some message about it’s content being blocked, but we have seen this interfere with the proper loading of the page in some browsers. In this case, you may have to access your parent FamZoo account from outside your parental controls or from within a parental control account that does not have Facebook blocked.

If you add the sites above and still experience problems using FamZoo with safe browsing software, please contact us. We’ll help you get to the bottom of it.