Firewalla can block/allow activities based on a schedule, say from 10 am to 1 pm.
What this is asking is to aggregate the time spent on certain activities (e.g. gaming), and set a limit for it over a certain period (e.g. throughout a day or week). Firewalla can not do this accurately, and the margin of error is very high.
The technology behind this involves predicting people's behavior at the network level, and it is something very difficult to do accurately at the moment.
Firewalla now supports this via "Users": https://help.firewalla.com/hc/en-us/articles/23857921094675-Firewalla-Feature-Users
Comments
34 comments
I found a workaround, sort of. I block internet on my kids' devices, then I temp unblock it for x amount of time. This works, but It requires me to do it manually every day.
All the building blocks are there. Just change some code.
Here's the vision:
@Matt. Let me split your requirements into two parts:
Set a time limit on Internet usage with daily extensions.
With Firewalla app version 1.61, you can already set time limits on certain apps via the time limit rule and pause the rule to extend the time for the current day as a reward. We are still exploring the possibility of setting time limits on all internet usage. However, since a device continuously generates background internet traffic while online, including this traffic could lead to inaccurate calculations.
Block Internet access during certain hours with daily extensions.
Firewalla supports creating a blocking rule with a schedule. For example, if you want to block internet usage between 9 PM and 7 AM the next day, you can schedule a blocking rule to achieve this. Temporarily pausing the rule during the blocking period will give your kids extra time online when needed.
Hi support team, "We are still exploring the possibility of setting time limits on all internet usage". This is what we need. The time calculation doesn't have to be super accurate, I just want to say to my kids you have x minutes a day todo anything internet related, it will be pretty easy to tell them to disconnect from the wifi to stop the byte transfer and therefore the clock on their time, they will soon realise if they want to preserve their time, they need todo this. And/or as you refine the feature, as others have said, you could add time back if say the bytes were low, i.e. in idle mode.
Apparently Disney cracked the code on this seemingly impossible task, before they sold out to the losers who nuked the product.
Firewalla team, if you want to see how the mouse did it, I would gladly donate my Disney Circle to the cause. It even has a USB-C charge port (so fancy). Why is this not a top priority? I've seen it come up over and over on this forum.
Please sign in to leave a comment.