I think you dealt with it well, and your actions mean that Alex is more likely to come to you again when he has some troubling information or a problem. That is a good thing.
He sounds like a good kid and the measures you’ve put in place mean you’ll continue to monitor his Facebook usage which will help keep him safe.
Facebook’s restriction is only for legal reasons. It’s a hassle to set yourself up where you can be for kids. I have it on good authority that they don’t actually care: I and some people I know have reported youngsters (whose parents we knew didn’t want them to have one) and nothing happened. The parents had to handle it.
I wonder if the folks here that express disdain for FB’s TOS feel the same for the TOS of SDMB?
In particular I wonder if folks would advocate setting up sock accounts here the same way they advocate doing so on FB?
Either way, what would be the difference?
Socks? They bad. I don’t like people on Facebook who set up fake accounts (a lot of people do so to roleplay people). Also, I was on the side of letting the kid have his own account.
But if a 12 year old can keep up with the SDMB and not let it slip that they’re 12? All the more power to them. Of course, if they get caught, out with them. But the same with Facebook.
What about accounts to separate business and personal, or separate businesses? That is more akin to what was discussed in this thread, but even that is banned here under the sock rule.
The sock rule here is in place because people don’t want to associate a post with their main account, not because people want to separate their business from their personal life.
They’re two different account schemes. There’s no easy way on Facebook to mark ‘I’m saying this as John Doe’ or ‘I’m saying this as John Doe Landscaping’ which is why people keep separate accounts. On the Dope, someone just says ‘As a lawyer, I say…’ and you’re just YOU, not User the User and User the Lawyer.
Although it would be interesting to see if a user got really popular on the Marketplace forum if the mods would let them make a second account just so their subscribed threads doesn’t get too cluttered. I assume they would allow it and put it in a special usergroup that can only post in the Marketplace and require every user of that type to format their username as UsernameStore.