About 2-3 years ago I purchased Plex pass to enable parental control over what content my Plex server provides to my children’s accounts, until recently it all appeared to work fine. Our children have their own account’s linked as home users to my primary plex pass account. All their home accounts have age restrictions enabled that limit what movies and TV shows they can watch to 12 and under.
Today my ‘furious’ wife bought one of their fire tables though and their Plex home page showed a huge amount of age inappropriate content, from films like “The sex monster” and “Sex after kids” to numerous zombie films. Even more worryingly, these actually play!
Initially I thought my server must have been hacked! After a concerning few minutes I found out these films aren’t being served from my home server or the grandparents server, but instead coming directly from Plex!
I’ve double checked the age restriction settings for their accounts through my admin settings and all previous set restrictions are still in place. They can still only see age appropriate content from our home server content.
How can Plex (software bought as a home media server - NOT a 3rd party streaming platform) suddenly start providing content we haven’t approved! Even more so, content that doesn’t even abide by the age restrictions set against each home account - this is disgusting and totally irresponsible!!!
I’ve managed to hide the Plex content by manually changing to each of my children’s accounts and disabling the online media sources, but there’s nothing there to stop the kids turning it back on.
If they have actual Plex Accounts of their own, you can only apply age restrictions to them for the content you share (from your server).
When it comes to kids for whom you want to control what content they get to see (beyond what’s shared from your own server), you should set them up as Managed Users. This will also allow you to apply a restriction profile (younger kid, older kid, teen, no restrictions) and control what online media sources they can see (so no need to worry what they might re-enable in their own accounts):
Hi, My 8 yr old has just told me there are 15 and 18 rated films on his account (thankfully he came to me) I bought a plex pass to avoid this, he is set up as a managed user, with restrictions, how do I stop him seeing these non age appropriate films and programs?
I’m struggling to find the settings to restrict this new content.
How did you restrict his managed account?
The support article about “Parental Controls” above shows how you can apply a “restriction profile” vs. individual restrictions per library.
A restriction profile should cover the content rating on all libraries – including the online media sources and video on demand offered by Plex (if you have enabled that for your managed users). Library restrictions apply only to your own libraries.
Hi, thanks for the reply
I’ve restricted his account by logging in as admin, users and sharing, and edited his account to restricted from the drop down menu, but the 15 and up content still shows, which means I have to unpin the plex content from each device, which can be undone by him (if he chose to)
If I may ask… what restriction profile did you chose for your kid (Younger Kid, Older Kid, Teen or None) and what rating the movies have he can still see (despite the restriction)?
According to the support article, the profiles should restrict the user like this:
Younger Kid: allows TV-Y, G, TV-G, and other equivalent ratings
Older Kid: allows all the ratings from the lower profile as well as TV-PG, PG, and other equivalent ratings
Teen: allows all the ratings from the lower profiles as well as TV-13, PG-13, and equivalent ratings
None: Can see all content ratings.
So movies with a rating of gb/15, au/15 etc. should not show for a Teen profile.
Edit:
I just checked those movies on some of the online databases used by Plex. It appears there’s a disconnect between the rating used “under the hood” and that displayed on the user interface. All 3 of those movies have a PG rating “somewhere” around the world (or in some database).
So… thanks for sharing… I’ve forwarded this to Plex so they can look into it (and ideally fine-tune their content filtering)
