Bonneville America Forums Forums Off Topic Discussion Forums Lounge A Little MAC Help Please

I just bought a Mac computer and I can't access the internet because we use AOL. I wasn't able to load AOL on the mac because the disk I have is too old, and unfortunately they don't distribute them to stores anymore. I called the tech line and they are sending out a new disk but it could take up to a couple of weeks to get here. I have a few options: first wait til disk gets here, second get our internet unbundled so we can get on without having to sign on,third is to download AOL from the web. If I unbundle it then we loose aol's parental controls.

How well does the parental controls work on the mac or with Safari?

When I went to download aol all I found that works for the mac is the desktop version.

What is that? Is that the basic aol or something different?

I really need parental controls on the internet and being all we really ever used was aol the wife is leery about anything else. But I really want to use the new comp.

Any help would be great.

Thanks,
Jim

Check the Safari > Help menu. You will need to set up the kids as a user and the parents as admin.

That's for the comp not Safari right?

turn the airport on and see if you can get a wifi signal from a neighbor, at least for a little bit

or you can go to a local computer store and see if they have AOL discs on the front counter... maybe you can just call before driving anywhere.

I would research to see what's out there for parental control besides AOL...

Right... you just gotta poke around. Use the Help drop down window.

blue Apple > System Preferences> Security

Well after talking to numerous "tech" people at AOL it was determined that it wouldn't work for the MAC the way I had it set up- AOL bundled together with Roadrunner. So I had to drop AOL and go with just Roadrunner.

Still trying to get a hang of this whole Mac thing though. After using a pc for years things that were second nature I have to relearn.

this is from the Safari help window, the great thing about mac is that when you have a question, its fairly simple to find the answer

Quote:

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Setting up parental controls
If you have an administrative account on a computer, you can set controls so users view only websites you’ve added to the bookmarks bar. They can’t enter web addresses in the address field, use the Google search field, or modify any of the bookmarks.

NOTE: Follow these instructions only if you’re using Mac OS X version 10.4 (Tiger). If you’re using Mac OS X version 10.5 (Leopard), see this topic instead:

Choosing which websites users can view
To choose approved websites for a user:


Log in as the user, and open Safari.


Choose Safari > Preferences, click Security, and deselect “Enable parental controls.”


Enter an administrator’s name and password when it is requested.


Add bookmarks for the websites you want the user to visit in the bookmarks bar. Remove all other bookmarks from the bookmarks bar.

When you add a page to the bookmarks bar, the user can visit any page on that site. For example, if you add a bookmark for http://www.apple.com/index.html, the user can visit any page at apple.com, and not just index.html.


When you’re done, choose Safari > Preferences, click Security, and then select “Enable parental controls.”


While you’re still logged in as the user, visit the sites you want that user to view to make sure the user can still view them. Some webpages don’t display content but transfer you automatically to a page on a different site. If you want the transfer to work correctly, both sites (the original site and the site you’re transferred to) must be in the bookmarks bar.

Parental controls don’t prevent users from viewing websites in other browsers. To prevent a user from using other web browsers, use the Accounts pane in System Preferences to set up the parental controls for Finder & System, and choose the applications the user can open.

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Thanks- I think I got the kids controls set up, and now that they're in bed I'll give it a run through on their accounts and see how it works.

If you do want to use AOL with your high speed use the aol.com webmail setup; AOL quit supporting Macs some time ago but the web based interface works very well (at least at my house).