• Lesson Index:
• Overview
• Installation
• Admin Panel
• User Rank
• User Registration
• Admin Email
• COPPA Regulation
• User Admin
• Adding Forums
• Member-Only Forums
• Moderators
• Disable Forum
• Backup Database
• Admin Password
• Upgrades
• phpBB Skins

COPPA Regulations:

COPPA stands for Children Online Privacy Protection Act regarding the collection of personal information from children under 13 years of age. You can learn more about it from the Federal Trade Commision website here. The legal terms of the act can be found here.

This is why during registration, the forum ask whether the user is under 13 years of age...

And if the user clicks " under 13 years of age", he/she will receive the following email prior to registration which requires a parental signature.

The parental signature can be faxed to or postal mailed to the contact supplied in the Admin Panel shown below...

When you receive the parental consent, you can active the user by finding the username in the User Management screen. The username is in the consent form.

And then switching the user to active ...

Note that this action does not trigger an email to be sent to the user. So you might want to manually send an email to the user informing him/her that you have recieved the parental consent and have activated his/her account. You can get his/her email at the top of the same form.

Disallow User Under 13

If you do not want to deal with parental consent and would rather not allow children under 13 from using the forums, then you can edit the COPPA email template to say that children under 13 are not allowed to register and use the forum. See this lesson on how to make the edit.

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