We signed our child up with Tynker a while ago. One selling point was the private servers that exploration can occur in.
We are just realizing that when in the “lobby” other people (strangers) might have the ability to interact with our child. Is there any way to turn off this ability while still allowing for exploration in the private server?
If my understanding is wrong - please clarify.
Thank you in advance.
Hi David and Lizzy,
There’s currently no way to turn off chat in the lobby - however, the lobby is just an intermediary step that your child goes through to access their private server.
When your child joins the Tynker server, they’ll be placed in the lobby, but as soon as they type “/join”, they’ll be taken to their private server. To test out mods and resource packs, students must be in their private server, not the lobby.
No one can join your child’s private server unless your child has whitelisted them by username.
Please let us know if this didn’t fully answer your question or if you have any additional concerns.
-Grace
I would like to echo David and LIzzy’s concern.
As a recent purchaser largely swayed by the minecraft modding courses, I was quite surprised when I stumbled into this while setting up an account intended for a grandchild. I am accustomed to the Minecraft Realms fashion of doing this where we end up directly in our own private environment with no intermediate step/exposure to the vagaries of others. I am not sure I am going to be able to present this as being OK to parents of my grandchild (and as a software engineer, I’m not sure I should try).
This seems like a notable shortcoming for a product targeted at elementary/middle school children and their quite reasonably paranoid parents/guardians/teachers. It feels to me like there needs to be some way to “autojoin” directly to the private server component and bypass the lobby, and that should really be the default mode, with accessing to the lobby requiring the account owner to opt in to giving their children access to the lobby and thus the potential to interact with strangers there.
I am curious if this issue has been resolved. My husband and I are strongly considering this course for our boys but we have a strict no chatting with strangers rule. And yet knowing that they would be placed in a very tempting situation while waiting in the lobby give us enough concern to hold off on signing he boys up for the course. Please let us know when and how you resolve this issue.
Thanks,
Mrs. Shider
Agreed. This is a big concern and one that should be addressed by Tynker. It should also be clearly disclosed to parents who sign their kids up to Tynker.