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Does Recreation Time include pornography? Do you expect parents to allow porn during children’s recreation hours?

I am directing this question to the NextDNS team, because the current design of Parental Controls and Recreation Time leaves a serious and very specific ambiguity that the UI and documentation do not resolve.

In the English description of Recreation Time, you state: “Set a period for each day of the week during which some of the websites, apps, games or categories above will not be blocked — e.g. allow Facebook on Mondays and Tuesdays between 6pm and 8pm.” The phrase “categories above” explicitly covers items such as Pornography, Gambling, Social Networks and Streaming Media, not just Games.

If Recreation Time can unblock “categories above”, and Pornography is one of those categories, then the documentation can reasonably be read as allowing pornography to become accessible during the hours defined as recreation time for children. In the current interface there is no visible way to distinguish which categories are governed by Recreation Time and which, if any, are always denied, so this interpretation cannot be ruled out by what the product actually shows to the user.

Without clear documentation or UI feedback, I cannot tell whether pornography is permanently blocked, or whether it will follow the same time-based rules as other categories. If the system is designed to treat pornography as “always denied”, that design choice is not expressed anywhere in the UI or documentation.

Because of that, I need an explicit clarification from the internal team, not guesses from other users:

Does Recreation Time include the Pornography category or not?
If it does not, why does the documentation say that “categories above” can be unblocked during that time window, without any exception being mentioned?
If it does, do you really expect parents to allow porn during their children’s recreation hours?

Children’s safety should not depend on undocumented special cases or on users making the “right” assumptions. As it stands, the wording of the Recreation Time description and the current UI leave it entirely unclear how pornography is treated, and that is not acceptable for a parental-control feature.

4 replies

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    • NextDNs
    • 2 wk ago
    • Reported - view

    When you enable recreation time, you get a new toggle on each category to select which ones are part of the recreation time.

      • Miwyi
      • 2 wk ago
      • Reported - view

       

      Thanks again — one more thing I’d like to clarify.
      It seems that the timezone is refreshed when the parental control schedule is re-saved,
      but what exactly determines that timezone?

      There’s no country or region setting in the account, so I assume it might be based on the device, browser, or perhaps the current IP geolocation at the time of saving?

      Knowing this would help a lot for users who move or use VPNs.

    • Miwyi
    • 2 wk ago
    • Reported - view

    Well, I'm glad to know there aren’t any parents out there intentionally showing porn during their kids’ recreation time 😅

    Still, that UI behavior was really confusing — I had no idea the recreation-time toggle would only appear after changing and saving the schedule.
    Maybe add a short note or hint for people like me who tend to click things before reading the fine print. 😄

    • The_Fixer004
    • 3 days ago
    • Reported - view

    I would like to reply to this post probably not for the reasons that they would assume I'm replying for but,, can you give me some specific subscriptions to ad blocking bundles that "allow pornography"  all the time? I do not want to inadvertently block any sites that may or may not be on my radar! 😁 Thank you

Content aside

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