MegaSack DRAW - This year's winner is user - rgwb
We will be in touch
I'm all setup to use family to control times, website access etc for the kids. I tried to allow a youtube page for school work, but the link gets corrupted. From "youtube.com....." it gets converted to "https://https// youtube.com...." so I can't view the link, and if I allow it, its useless
Only slightly more useless is Microsoft's tech support. 2 online chats, presumably with AI bots, but then had a phone call. Was transferred, but then got cutoff as the system didn't recognise my number
The next attempt at support and the virtual chat got cutoff. Gah.
Yeah, it's pretty basic an prone to stop working, especially if their PC isn't 100% patched all the time. Even with auto-update enabled, it stops working for us a couple times a year.
Also, every kid with a Twitch or the other one account knows a million workarounds for it, it becomes very cat and mouse.
Anyway, it won't handle allowing a specific Youtube url very well, if at all.
YouTube URLs are a nightmare to deal with as they are prone to obfuscation and change. If it's a specific YouTube video you want to allow access to then using the 'link to' feature on the video itself should give you a stable link to use (click the share button on the video and use the link shown in there).
As for general family access.. I'd recommend taking control of it yourself if so inclined and setting up a Pi-Hole on a raspberry Pi. It's an ad/content blocker but with a wee bit of work you can add blocklists for objectionable content or completely lockdown your network to allow only whitelisted sites. Bit harder to get around as well as you would set it up as the DHCP assigned DNS server on your router.
I only use it for M365 family licensing (cheap from Argos) and Xbox screen time.
For web filtering I use OpenDNS which isn't perfect but provides categories, whitelists and blacklists. I bought a static IP for a fiver flat-fee from PlusNet after the dns-o-matic stopped working from my BT router.