Parent authorization by SMS?

For discussion by the community — please reply on Tootsbook!

The new login system for children (ages under 13) requires a parental authorization using the parent’s (age 18+) Google account. (Facebook accounts will likely be supported soon, as well, but there have been some pain points there.)

The current design works like this: Your child enters their Toot character name, and then chooses a “password” made up of several symbols. Perhaps: Elephant, 3, Carrot. Once they’ve requested a sign-in, an e-mail message is sent to the parent’s account, with several links allowing the parents to approve an amount of play time; they can just click a link on their PC or smart phone to authorize 1, 2, or 3 hours, or go to the web page and enter in a different amount of time. In the mean time, the child can watch some short, kid-friendly movies from http://archive.org/ and the like while they wait.

To send and receive SMS (mobile text) messages, in addition to allowing this e-mail/web system, we can pretty easily do something similar. Imagine receiving a text message like:

Tootsville.org: "Catvlle" wants to play now.
Send NO to deny, or number of hours to allow.
HELP for help; STOP to remove your number.

Naturally, we would require parents to opt-in and “claim” their mobile number first …

Tootsville.org: To confirm your mobile number,
sign in and enter this code: XYZ42
- or visit http://toots.one/YgHe830

The downside of this feature is that each text message will cost us about a penny (1¢ / USD$.01), on average, to US numbers, and sometimes a bit more overseas.

We’ve been strongly promoting the “nothing to buy” and “Really Free” aspect of Tootsville.org, and I don’t want to seem sneaky or underhanded about offering this as a sort of premium service; but, I also don’t want to run up a $1,000 “phone” bill that way.

If we offered the SMS service as a “premium” feature, do you think that would violate our “nothing to buy” and “Really Free” promises? That is, the basic e-mail-based access will be (forever) completely free, but if someone wants to subscribe to the SMS service for a small, additional monthly fee — I would expect this to be something like a $1-2/month, $10-20/year kind of cost for players in the US, Canada, Western Europe, Australia, etc., and maybe a bit more in some countries — would that be acceptable? If so, how do we communicate effectively that this fee is just to cover the additional costs of the SMS feature?

Needless to say, there are expenses of running a project like this, and no actual source of income. We’ve already discussed and agreed that sales of merchandise to support the project will be acceptable, and some day in future plan to organize a

This isn’t happening very soon, if at all, but it is something about which I’d like some public feedback and discussion before putting in any more work on it.

I look forward to hearing your opinions … (~BRFP, Benevolent Dictator)

3 thoughts on “Parent authorization by SMS?

  1. Unique_Unit says:

    I’d like to put my own opinion and just say that it’s not worth it. The ability to just accept it through E-mail for free is incentive enough for people to opt out of the idea of paying any amount for an SMS service that they won’t be using more than once.

    1. Violet Volts Team says:

      Just to be clear, the parental authorization is for each play session. When children under 13 log in, their parents approve it for a number of hours — so it’s something they might be using every day.

  2. Sienna says:

    I personally think it would be acceptable, and to ensure that the parents understand what the money is for you could simply have a short paragraph explaining it similar to how you did here, since it is a necessary cost. I just found out about this project and saw some screenshots of what looks like the game on the sub-Reddit: is there any way for me to play test it or is that private?

Leave a Reply