As a new parent I am just learning certain lessons about when to protect my child and when to let go so they can develop into a well rounded person. Every parent wants their child to grow up to be like them and for that reason our children tend to learn our bad habits and vices. Luckily in my favorite vice, World of Warcraft, there are a number of addons you can use to try and protect your family from the elements you deem inappropriate. Most of the game is fairly clean for a child over the age of 12 or so, but the game doesn’t do a great job controlling the vulgarity and quite honestly stupidity that spews forth from the chat channels 24 hours a day. Here are a few of the top rated chat filter addons currently available.
- BadBoy is a spam filter that auto reports any incoming spam in any of your chat channels. Additionally you can add BadBoy_CCleaner to filter any chat containing anal/rectum/or other inappropiate words from you or your kids.
- Blocku is a whipser authentication addon that does not allow whispers from anyone not on your friends list, in guild, party, or a raid. It also does not block whispers from GMs or NPCs.
- WhoWhisperedMe automatically does a /who on anyone that whispers you unless they are in your guild.
- Both WoW Instant Messenger and Whisp keep track of multiple whisper conversations that you can go back and look at. However, I have not found an addon yet that allows you to save them after logging off or export them in any way.
- Unlinked blocks linked items (Thunderfury) or achievements in your chat in the same way CCleaner filters words. It is customizable allowing you to set links that are allowed through the filter or just specific items to be blocked.
- LeaveMeAlone goes a step further and blocks duels, party, raid, and guild invites and creates a list of blocked player that can be set to auto ignore if desired.Â
- TB Silent Ignore is an interesting addon that has several neat features including the ability ignore players without sending a “This Player is Ignoring You” message. It also give infinite ignore spaces, ignores are saved account wide, and an out-bound blocker keeps you from whispering people you forgot were on your ignore list in case you were expecting a response.
I struggled to find addons that parents could use as timers to limit game time but even out of game programs seem to be few and far between. Fortunately, in game you have a few options to keep your children or yourself from the constant vulgarityhat plagues the chat channels.
Found a cool addon? Want to share a UI tip? In the mood to contribute a guest post? Have some ideas for future posts? Feel free to 
LeaveMeAlone has been bugged for many people since 3.1 and not updated.
Many people find that it will now automatically decline every party invite regardless of your settings or who sent the invite.
I have had to disable the Addon as it kept declining the guild raid invites :(
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Cellular (similar to WIM) has an option of logging your whisper conversations, and it will save them in the lua file in SavedVariables folder for each character.
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Elephant add-on allows you to keep track of all your conversations. It stores I think up to 250 messages in Whisper, Say, Party, Raid, Guild, Officer, etc. You can look back through any of them at any time. It keeps them in a LUA file and I think can be exported, but I’m not sure about that.
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” struggled to find addons that parents could use as timers to limit game time”
WoW has built in parental controls that allow you to limit playing to specified hours. It isn’t that flexible, and you can’t define say ’10 hours during the week at any time’, but it is there.
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Elephant can be set to log up to 1000 lines of each chat (including custom channels), and saves them if you log out or disconnect. I have had a few problems with small errors, but haven’t found anything else to duplicate this functionality.
http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/info5423-Elephant.html
Thanks for the great comments and suggestions guys. I feel like a nub for not remembering about the Blizzard parental controls. Even as limited in usefulness as they are they still do the job of limiting game time. Haven’t had time to check out Elephant or Cellular yet but they sounds like they have some very useful features. Sorry to hear about LeaveMeAlone not working for some people. I did not personally have any issues when testing it but I don’t use it regularly so I might have missed something.
BugMeNot does a similar thing to LeaveMeAlone (I preferred LeaveMeAlone though) and can be found at http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/bug-me-not.aspx
The author of LeaveMeAlone has stated that he is going to rework it and make it work, but I get the impression that he doesn’t play as much anymore and its not a huge priority. Not complaining of course, I can’t write Addons at all!
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I’m going to assume, for obvious reasons, that you also play wow with your kid. There’s a simpler solution than all of the above addons… just take him out of general and trade. That’s where 90% of the stupidity happens. If he needs something crafted or whatnot, he should be going to your guild for help or the AH, or you can venture into trade for him. I doubt tells would be an issue, but what do I know anyway? I mean, I will never have children, I don’t want them, and I’ve been on IRC since I saw 13…
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Actually my daughter is 11 months so obviously she is behind on starting a character but I thought she should wait a bit. I do think that leaving trade, general, and other chats would be a possible solution for someone wanting to protect their young kids, but there are enough reasons out to have these addons that they get hundreds of downloads a week. Its important to give people options and let them choose how to use them.
Well, my general thoughts on the matter are (again, I will never be a parent…) kids <12 really shouldn’t be playing, or should only be playing with a parent at all times (which is really a wonderful idea, I’ve played both video and board games with my parents my whole life). 12 and up, even if you don’t want to admit it to yourself, well there’s really very little harm in trade’s shenanigans… because honestly the crap that goes on in the is exactly the crap kids that age do.
I think a better solution than blocking the realities of the internet from your kid is to let them see if for themselves and encourage them to be mature and better than the other idiots out there. I’ve been in “mature” guilds that had kids in them before. We didn’t have language restrictions, and the few kids in the guild no one knew they weren’t adults unless it was pointed out, because they didn’t act like kids at all. Regardless of age, if they act mature, your kids will have fun in-game and will actually learn some good shit like how to work in groups and doing something solely for someone else’s benefit.
Not that I’m against addons, obviously. But I do believe that addons are a poor solution to social problems, and kids on the internet is 100% a social problem.
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I respect your opinion as both an adult and a addon developer. However, I think it is important to distinguish between reality and games on the internet. In reality if someone were to say something inappropriate to a child beyond a simple curse word or something of the sort, that person would be immediantly identifiable. On the internet, whether I or you or anyone likes it, children will be present and parents given the means and options to protect them from anonymous persons in whatever way they deem necessary. This site is about addons so I gave a few options available. The other options, as you have pointed out, are don’t play and leave chat channels. So now our readers have even more options :)
Thank you SO SO *SO* much for making me aware of TB Silent Ignore. I’ve been looking for something like that for awhile now. <3!
@ Tekkub. While I can agree with you about children playing with their parents. We did that and still had a problem. Starting in Northshire Abbey and running through Goldshire to get starting quests left my daughter with a stalker I had to threaten to report to the GMs because he still sent her propositions even after finding out she was a child and then commenced to follow us around harrassing us. Trust me just because you play next to your child does not completely protect them for the kind of players you want to protect them from. I will have to respectfully disagree that it is children on the internet that is a problem. I find it is the people who use the annonimity of the internet to behave inappropriately to be problem. They can be of any age, listening to them on vent proves that.
But at the same time do you deny them the ability to play a game just because some people don’t seem to have the ability to understand right and wrong interactions? Is it any different than telling them they can’t play hockey because some people can’t control themselves and get into fights in the ring or get drunk and vulgar at the game?
Chuck thanks for the suggestions. I think the auto ignore will be a boom for starting areas especially.
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Chuck, I noticed that you made the statement about not finding an addon that holds a history of chats/whispers, I use elephant to capture mine. You might want to give it a try.
If you have the FuBar, there is an addon called HeyFu which will save all whispers sent/received on that particular character for a week. It’s character specific, so you can’t be on one character and pull up the whisper logs from another character, but it’s still nice all the same.
However, in the end, parental supervision is going to be number one. Addons can record and they can somewhat block, but they can’t actively stop bad situations from happening. It’ll be another 10 or so years before we have a little one playing computer games, but my husband already has ideas in place to watch what she’ll do: webcams, trojans, and keyloggers to actually work for us :P
[...] that they might be seeing things in chat channels that they shouldn’t be? NoStockUI has some suggestions for the parent that wants their child’s game experience to be a little safer. Click here to submit a link [...]
For a timer, try using Microsoft Steady State. When you log onto Windows on a protected account, it permits changes based on your settings that you allow, and it has a built-in session timer for the Windows logon session that displays on-screen so they can constantly know how much time they have left. When the timer’s up you can have it log them out of Windows, or reboot the system completely.
This would also keep them from deleting files, adding files or making system changes, which is good for your PC, and helps you maintain those other addons you’ve enabled.
Wow, TB Silent Ignore is amazing. Now I can finally ignore jackass guild members without them crying and throwing a hissy fit because I’ve ignored them. :D
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Thank you so much for this article. I do use WiM and look back at the conversations my son has, but its worth noting that one can simple shift-left click the minimize button which will close the window and NOT save the chat.
I’m gonna look into the other addons you mention that log the other channels. I especially would like to give the badboy cc_cleaner a shot- not only for my son but for me too. The use of profanity is so rampant and immature it gets irritating.
Thanks again,
Acerbus Noir
[...] Parental Advisory [...]
[...] seeing things in chat channels that they shouldn’t be? NoStockUI has some suggestions for the parent that wants their child’s game experience to [...]
[...] that they might be seeing things in chat channels that they shouldn’t be? NoStockUI has some suggestions for the parent that wants their child’s game experience to be a little safer. Click here to submit a link [...]
I’m not quite sure if I understand the problem, but my WIM saves every conversation I’ve had up until 5 weeks back for each char.
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