Yes, the parents are active members in good standing. Also the regular members and guests can't even see the kids boards and we have a teenager actually as a Junior Mod to help keep and eye on things and help the kids with anything they might need. The parents of these kids normally don't have access, unless they really need it, most of the parents end up looking over their kids shoulders anyway lol

When signing up they have a special form to fill out which goes into the admin email account. It does have their age, grade, real name and username they want, then I have to manually add them. I guess printing that info would be a good idea

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A 12-year-old on a parenting forum? I know teen pregnancy rates are high, but now things are getting ridiculous...


Joking aside though, I simply deny all registrations under 13. Kids under 13 who are smart enough to participate on a forum will enter a false age [unfortunately, so will the immature ones]

I think that unless you run a forum for kids, enabling the "Deny registrations for users under 13" option is the best thing to do. I doubt many forums will miss out on any members with this enabled.

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haha yeah, that would be ridiculous! They don't even see those kinds of boards. Its more like the pet board and celebration board, then they have their own set of boards with topics and categories appropriate to their age group.

But I totally understand just not letting kids onto boards, it can be just too risky.

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I'm not particularly worried about the members posting inappropriate content, they're very well behaved. The only posts I've ever had to delete for inappropriate content have come from trolls and spammers. The spammers are a thing of the past now that I have vBulletin with NoSpam, and I haven't seen any trolls since the last "attack", so...

The forum is for clowns and other children's entertainers, so while it isn't technically for children, it is attractive to some of them. I know several of the members' kids read, and some of the older ones have accounts of their own (just not any under 13 that I know of).

I guess I mostly worry about a non-member coming by, seeing kids, and sticking around for nefarious purposes. So I think I'll try the suggestion of creating a forum just for the kids and making it invisible to non-members.

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