CyberSitter

by Solid Oak Software

Product Features

• Now records all Instant Messenger chat conversations for AOL (AIM), and Yahoo Messengers.
• CYBERsitter provides over 30 categories of filtering making it the most complete Internet filter available.
• CYBERsitter allows parents to override blocked sites, add their own sites to block, specify allowable times to access the Internet, and maintains a detailed log of all Internet activity and violations.

Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• ASIN: B000FAB6P8
• Date first available at Amazon.com: April 4, 2006
• Average Customer Review: 2.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #11,205 in Software (See Top 100 in Software)

Product Description

CYBERsitter 9.0 is designed primarily for home, educational and small business use. Even though CYBERsitter has been designed to be easily installed and used by the most inexperienced users, there are plenty of advanced features for power users too.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Pretty Good Internet Filter, November 30, 2006

By 

David A. Bielby "Ev Xpistw" (Normal, IL USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: CyberSitter (CD-ROM)

First off, we have a five user pack, with one installed on each of our kids computers (four kids w/computers at home). I have used it for 3 years. I chose this over some other software available because 3 years ago it had more features than the other companies out there.

Let me say a couple of things. Some of the features work well, and some don't. For example, we have put options in for the kids to be able to access their own personal pages on Myspace (which I monitor), but not the other pages. That doesn't seem to matter, Cybersitter won't let one of my kids on her page, but the other one CAN go. I followed the same procedure for both computers. My son is not allowed to play his war game online, even though I told it to let him online...put that game in the good list...it will let him onto the site...let him set up a game...but then freezes the loading...very frustrating for kids trying to play. The only way around this I have found is to suspend the program (that's easy to do for an administrator).

The snoop feature doesn't work on any of their computers...so I cannot see what they've been doing. Also, the report emails work fine, and have been useful from time to time. I know one of my kids had a friend who was trying to se profanity in chats and they were blocked regularly...the report shows who that was and the blocked messages. It is very difficult to read though....because it looks almost like a computer read out.

Some kids will try to work around CyberSitter by using proxy websites. CyberSitter really should block all proxy sites, but they don't.

At the same time CyberSitter has regularly not allowed sites that are supposed to be blocked. For example we have gambling sites checked as places we don't want our kids to go to. One of my teens was doing a research report on the recent James Bond movie "Casino Royale". Because it had the word Casino in it, she could see none of the hits until I suspended the program filtering temporarily. Even though that was irritating, I felt good that it was still blocking some things.

I am adding filters to my office computers and will try another brand-because I have become aware of another company that has a filter that is better in some respects, perhaps operating more smoothly than CyberSitter...but it does not have email/IM protection...and if kids do anything online they are probably on AOL IM..... So for kids this is number one because it is still the best one on the market that has instant message and email filtering...how can anyone say they are protecting kids without that?? It is absolutely amazing to me that there are products on the market that claim to protect kids from the junk out there...and they have NOTHING for chat/email. To me that is just not living in the real world. So even with it's flaws, I think CyberSitter is the best thing available for families and I recommend you get it.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Always dependable, July 17, 2006

By 

Software Guy "Software Guy" (Santa Barbara, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: CyberSitter (CD-ROM)

CYBERsitter has been around since the Internet became available to personal users. The company is still there and still updating and supporting the product. I can always get answers to questions, plus I have never had to pay any update fees. I had one serious problem with a spyware program that caused my Internet to lock up. The CYBERsitter guys helped me get going again, even though it turned out the problem had nothing to do with CYBERsitter.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Has some positives, but also some negatives, January 8, 2009

By 

Melissa J. Newman "msolomon25" (Elizabeth, NJ United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: CyberSitter (CD-ROM)

I wonder if some of the people reviewing this are reviewing a different version. The version that I have has the ability to block proxy sites. There is also the ability on a Windows XP install to disallow access to a DOS prompt, control panel, time changing, and a couple of other functions that kids were using to get around CYBERsitter. The documentation says that the ability to block those items is part of Vista, so on a Vista install those options are not available. I installed on a Windows XP computer, so I can't comment about a Vista install.

Since I was using OpenDNS filtering for filtering the outright bad websites, I was looking for a product that could handle the gray websites like wikipedia and YouTube.

The program has the ability to block social networking sites, chat sites, Instant Message, newsgroups, mail websites, etc. I just blocked those sites on my install, so I cannot comment on how CYBERsitter interacts with those types of websites or programs.

There is no ability to have accounts. It is an all or nothing deal. You can say that certain logins should not use filtering, but you can't say that child_A is a young child, so only let the child go on kids websites, while child_B is a teenager, so do content filtering.

My main concern was Wikipedia and YouTube type of sites. That is where most of my testing was done. There is an ability to add custom filter words. I just looked at certain wiki projects whose pages I had issues with and entered those words into the filter dialog box, and the content was filtered correctly. To help not filter general discussions about those topics, I used the detailed anatomical words.

The main problems is that there is no logic to the filtering. If I said to filter "apple", it would not filter "apples" or "apple.jpg".

The website says that there is custom code for filtering on and Facebook, but I could not find the settings in my install of CYBERsitter version 10.8.4.30. Actually, if one reads the website carefully it says something along the lines of feature is included or will be in the future. In other words, they are planning to add it, but it has not been added yet.

Would I recommend this product to somebody else? If you have very small children under the age of 8 (not able to type searches on their own), the Vista controls set to "high" should be fine. If you have children that are only in 1 age category (teens or children or seniors), this product should work fine. If you have mixed age groups, there is going to be issues due to the lack of logins integrated with windows.

If you are planning to test a bunch of different filtering programs, there will be problems, because they will conflict with each other. When CYBERsitter was installed, even though I told it to be deactivated, it caused problems with my testing of NetNanny.

Oh, I also did not like the way that if a user tried to access a page that was not allowed, it randomly goes to another page. That is good if you want to run the program in hidden mode, but if you want to run the program more openly, it causes problems. It would have been nicer if there was the ability to select different options: bring up your own webpage, custom message and custom icon (like OpenDNS has), a dialog asking the admin to give permission to access the page permanently or temporarily, etc.