No overview was provided for this lesson.
[color=#7e90bf]Welcome to Jappleng![/color] Good day parents! We’re
happy to hear that you’re interested in what we do and we'll try to
explain just that and how you can protect your child on our
website. Here’s what you need to know… [color=#7e90bf]Who and What
We Are[/color] We are Jappleng University, we’re not really a
University like Stanford or MIT, but rather an online web service
that loves to teach and give people the opportunity to teach.
Sometimes teachers will have their own classrooms on Jappleng so
that they can keep track on their student’s progress, grades, and
other things. We don’t directly award any credits to anyone, but
teachers can give out certificates and school credits as much as
they like. We also provide other services such as Jappleng Public
News which is where anyone can post what they heard of in Japan.
Simply put, it’s news about Japan created by members of this site,
whether it’s biased, badly written or a masterpiece – it’s entirely
up to the individual that writes it and other members get to vote
and comment on them. We also provide a social network called J-Spot
Social Network. The J is ambiguous for Jappleng and Japan but
either way it works and it’s a place (spot) where people can hang
out and share their thoughts about their day, study progress, or
share items they care about. This is very much like any other
social network except our members are free to use any alias they
desire and role-play as their favorite characters. There are also
other social applications that we maintain like our Community
Forums, Image-Boards, J-Blogs, Club Jappleng and Online Chat.
Social applications can get dicey for the younger viewer or
sensitive individuals. We are also a very small company, so small
that you couldn’t even locate us on a map. But we do it because we
love Japan and the Japanese culture. Interestingly enough we wanted
to make Jappleng into a non-profit organization initially but the
business model wasn’t sustainable for the overhead as a non-profit,
so we had to change course to a for profit company with a different
approach. We maintain our heart into this project just like a
non-profit because we love it, and we know this service is greatly
needed by so many people. We certainly care about our members and
non-members that enjoy learning more about Japan. So please
consider allowing your child to register with us, but please be
sure to keep reading to learn more about what else we do and how to
keep safe. [color=#7e90bf]We also make things fun! [i](J-Points,
Achievements, and Tokens)[/i][/color] We have included many
features that make Jappleng enjoyable which include Achievement
awards, J-Points (our digital currency), daily login bonuses, and
more. J-Points can be obtained either by utilizing the website such
as posting new content, using J-Spot, or even studying! It can also
be obtained through the use of real money by purchasing site tokens
and converting them into J-Points. We do not store credit cards to
our system and every transaction will require the card to prevent
accidental charges for your benefit. Your child can unlock many
things by utilizing J-Points from new site features to personalized
items. We don’t utilize advertisements and solely rely on the sale
of Tokens. Tokens can be used to register for online classes and be
converted into J-Points if needed [i](but once it’s been converted
to a J-Point, it cannot be converted back to Tokens)[/i]. Tokens
may be purchased at the J-World Market. [color=#7e90bf]Anyone can
post things, it’s the Internet[/color] Mind you that because ANYONE
can post anything at any given time, and while we do have rules set
in place, you never know what might show up from one moment to the
other. Additionally, what may be acceptable in one country may not
seem age-appropriate to another. We tend to follow a Japanese PG-13
outlook which tends to be about PG-16 in some other countries, but
it can quickly become mature rated if the member that uploaded the
content broke the rule or didn’t add a “mature” tag to the post.
This also means that anyone can say anything they like and this can
be problematic for the sensitive types. If your child is sensitive
to arguments, accusations, or being called names over the internet,
then perhaps it would be best to not allow them to use our social
applications. Friends must be accepted, and you must be a friend in
order to post on another person’s J-Spot (similar to a facebook
wall), but anyone can claim to be kind at first glance but may very
well be a bully in the end. This is the nature of the internet as
well as life as you may know, and while we do have moderators and
rules, sometimes that’s not enough and action is needed by the
member’s part. [color=#7e90bf]What you can do in the event of
online bullying[/color] Online bullying / harassment can be very
subjective in terms of definition, but if you simply don’t like
someone you can opt to remove them as a friend from your friend
list. They won’t be allowed to talk to you or your child anymore
wherever you set “Friends Only” in the permission settings. Here
we’ll be discussing escalation steps and what to do in each step,
and while we doubt the occurrence of cyberstalkers, we want to
provide a sort-of guide that will be helpful to resolute the
situation. The second step if they continue to harass you would be
to tell a moderator about the situation and we’ll investigate this
issue. There’s no real time-frame when we can get back to you but
clicking on “Report” and writing a reason why will help us know
more about this person. We strive to have a peaceful community and
will act against the abusers. If that’s not enough, perhaps they
found a way such as using a proxy to gain access to our website
after being banned and they continue to harass. If it reaches this
step (which has never occurred so far), then consider changing your
username. You can do this pro-bono only if the reason is to avoid
harassment. Just let a moderator know what is going on and we’ll
follow up. Be sure to have a valid E-Mail because your E-Mail will
be used to send you the new login information. It’s hard to imagine
that it would get any worse than that but we’ve heard of certain
communities that had really bad issues with cyberstalkers. If that
person is still being bothersome, we would recommend creating a new
account. We can help you transfer your J-Points, Tokens, and some
*limited* other information over to your new account. See how much
we care about our members? =) At this point it would be highly
unlikely that the problem would persist but if it does then
consider the possibility that this person is known locally. Perhaps
it’s a friend not being a good friend, or a bully from school, who
really knows? We can work with local authorities at this point (and
only at this point) to help figure out who’s been causing this kind
of abuse. The type of information we will be able to give out is an
IP address. We try our best to seek out the real IP address but we
cannot guarantee anything. Obviously if it gets that severe and
we’ve only heard of such horror stories in rare instances around
other communities, you can disable as many services as you like
from the Parental Control panel. This will allow you to block
J-Mail, Social Media, Comments and any section that you want to
ignore. We don’t believe this will happen much if ever, but having
a ready guide is always welcome. If you believe you have an even
better guide to fight against online bullying, please let us know
so we can work on improving our guide. Our goal is to make this an
amazingly happy community. [color=#7e90bf]Restricting
Access[/color] You can restrict access via a few different ways but
if you decide to block certain portions of Jappleng by using your
firewall or safe browser application, it may break the site
entirely because Jappleng communicates from one section to another
on a live basis. It’s a living and breathing website so-to-speak so
by blocking a single page like J-Spot’s URL, it would equate to
blocking the human heart meaning Jappleng won’t work anymore, it
may not even load at all period. What you could do instead is go to
the Settings and under Parental Control you can decide what section
your child is allowed to take part of. By default everything is
enabled so make sure that you review each section and consider what
you want your child to be exposed to. The parental control has a
password associated to it; therefore if you forget the parental
control password, you will have to reset it using the parental
E-Mail which is also located in the parental controls. There is no
parental E-Mail created initially, the E-Mail you provided during
registration is the one for your child, this is done so that your
child can reset their login password without involving the parent
every time and to receive E-Mail notifications. Last but not least,
the Maturity filter is a unique filters that filters out mature
content by keywords and if the item in question was flagged for
mature audience. For instance, the F-word would be filtered out as
@#$% instead of actually spelling it out. We try to work with
spelling alternatives as kids like to avoid the filter as much as
they can, but it’s a work in progress that we’re proud of
implementing. The maturity filter may be applied whenever
publishing items, but sometimes it can be forgotten or purposely
left out. That’s when we have our nifty community and moderators
that go around and “flag for maturity”. This method is pretty
convenient and should alleviate a good chunk of mature content that
gets passed the filters. [color=#7e90bf]The Rules[/color] We have
many Rules, Terms of Service, have a Privacy Policy and explain how
we use Cookies. We do what we can to keep this community clean,
safe, and more importantly fun for all! We wouldn’t recommend
having a sensitive child use our website, even our lessons could
sometimes have content that you may not agree with. For instance we
could teach how to say tobacco and alcohol in Japanese in one of
the lessons. Don’t worry though, when we have mature related
lessons such as ones that talk about how to cuss in Japanese, we
have a maturity flag set and if your child’s account has the
maturity filter enabled, they won’t be able to study it.
[color=#7e90bf]We Give it our All![/color] We try our best, but
let’s be perfectly honest; kids will be kids no matter what you say
or try to tell them to do. They are a clever bunch and will find
loopholes and ways around it that not even we can foretell. This is
why when you allow your child to browse Jappleng on their own, even
with maturity filters, there’s no telling what they may see. This
is a community-based web service after all and both good and bad
people can join and there’s no telling what they’ll do until they
actually do it. So far it’s been tame and we’re proud of that. But
if your child has access to the internet, they can see far worse
things with a simple Google search. We are a fun, proud community
and whenever something comes up; we work on resolving it and
improve the site at every opportunity. Your love, support,
criticisms and opinions are always welcome and if you wish to ask
us any question before creating an account for your child, then
send us an E-Mail at support @ [(Jappleng)].com (kindly remove the
spaces and brackets, this helps prevent spam).
[color=#7e90bf]Getting Started[/color] Simply
[url=https://www.jappleng.com/register]click here[/url] to navigate
to the registration page to get started. All it takes is a few
things to answer like “what is your username and password?”
Registration takes about a minute but the journey lasts a lifetime!