Is Wordpress child friendly?

[redcogs]

my daughter has asked to establish an account with WordPress.com. She is 10. Has anyone experience of the site who could offer a view about its suitability for youngsters please?

 

[Dave5N]

Yeah - she can put her own stuff up - you can set it so people have to register to comment on posts.

 

[thomas]

I'm pretty sure. Wordpress as in the blogging software it uses definitely is. Just be careful with who you let post comments and things, can get a lot of porn/viagra spam bots taking over.

 

[ColinJ]

If I was you, I'd set yourself (or some other responsible adult) up as the blog Administrator, and set your daughter up as a Contributor. You can add as many Contributors accounts as you like. As Admin, you are all-powerful. Contributors can make their own blog posts and edit them before publication, but Admin is responsible for publishing them on the blog after checking them. Once you've published the posts, Contributors can't change them so that should be okay.

Set it up so that all comments have to be moderated by you before you let them appear.

I wouldn't want to let your 10 year old have complete control because you know what the internet is like - there's eventually going to be some dodgy character trying something. You need to filter that stuff out so she never gets to see it.

I'd make sure that you only allow links to genuinely safe external material. Somebody could post a link to a picture of a cute puppy and change it to something unsavoury at a later date. It would be better to upload all pictures to the blog so that they can't be changed without your intervention.

 

[Dave5N]

If I was you, I'd set yourself (or some other responsible adult) up as the blog Administrator, and set your daughter up as a Contributor. You can add as many Contributors accounts as you like. As Admin, you are all-powerful. Contributors can make their own blog posts and edit them before publication, but Admin is responsible for publishing them on the blog after checking them. Once you've published the posts, Contributors can't change them so that should be okay.

Set it up so that all comments have to be moderated by you before you let them appear.

I wouldn't want to let your 10 year old have complete control because you know what the internet is like - there's eventually going to be some dodgy character trying something. You need to filter that stuff out so she never gets to see it.

I'd make sure that you only allow links to genuinely safe external material. Somebody could post a link to a picture of a cute puppy and change it to something unsavoury at a later date. It would be better to upload all pictures to the blog so that they can't be changed without your intervention.

That's right. However she is ten years old and doesn't need Dad to censor her posts. Give her publishing rights. Just don't let the world comment back until they have registered, and if you want, you have approved the comment.

 

[ColinJ]

That's right. However she is ten years old and doesn't need Dad to censor her posts. Give her publishing rights. Just don't let the world comment back until they have registered, and if you want, you have approved the comment.

I'm thinking in terms of protecting her from accidentally giving away more information than she should - what school she goes to, her address, her age, that kind of thing.

My stepdaughter posted a bit too much information about herself online once when she was 17 and she ended up getting phonecalls from middle-aged male strangers, and letters and emails containing photographs of masturbation and so on. At least she was old enough to cope with it, and nobody actually stalked her but they certainly knew where she lived. I found that pretty scary. The thought of that happening to a 10 year old is terrifying. I'd rather be over-cautious than under-cautious.

I watched a TV programme last week where a teenager who thought that he'd been very careful online was introduced to an online security expert who shocked him by telling him his name, address, birthday, parents' names, what school he went to etc etc. He'd done it by assembling little snippets of information from comments left on other peoples' blogs, facebook, myspace and so on.

 

[Dave5N]

Fair enough. I think we can all be a bit too relaxed about the internet. Still, It'll all be alright wheneverything is all on a National Identity database, won't it?

 

[Carwash]

I'd argue it's probably more child-friendly than MySpace or Facebook or whatever it is the kids are into these days.

 

[HJ]

I'm pretty sure. Wordpress as in the blogging software it uses definitely is. Just be careful with who you let post comments and things, can get a lot of porn/viagra spam bots taking over.

Just use the Akismet plugin to stop that sort of thing...

 

[ColinJ]

Just use the Akismet plugin to stop that sort of thing...

I use that. It flags up suspected spam and I double-check it - so far it has been right every time. I still moderate all other comments before publishing them though.