I am very disappointed with Parental controls of the Netgear. I would say its parental controls is the worst one of all routers in the world becasue althought it is complicated, it could never work well.
I had a Amped router. Amped router may not be the best router, but their Parental controls is easy to use and effective. I cannot understand why Netgear designed such a complicated Parental controls and it is hard to use.
Let me tell you my experience regarding Netgear Parental controls. At the beginning, I was excited with my new NETGEAR Nighthawk Pro Gaming XR700. I supposed it at least would not be worse than Amped. I openned "http://www.routerlogin.net/" and set up "content filtering". I added a couple of keywords to block sites and set the blockage to "always". I thought everything was done; however, I found my kids still could view those websites. My Gosh! What's wrong? Why it did not work? After my homework, I still did not get any solution. All right, let me try "block services". Unlike Amped router, I realized this time I could only add IP address to the block table. Anyway, the service blockage worked a couple of days; however, it became ineffective soon because the ip address of my kid's computer changed after it reconnected to the Netgear router. What can I say? The design is so stupid. I am supprised Netgear engineers did not know sometimes a computer's IP address could change and IP blockage is not a best way. Amped MAC address blockage is much much effective than Netgear. As a result, both "block sites" and "block services" could not work. They are trash.
I suspected I did not dig out right tricks on how to set up Netgear router so that I did my homework further. Then, I found there were something called Netgear genie and Opendns. Honestly, these two things unnecessarily complicate Parental controls so much. This is not the only headache; the biggest headache is genie and Opendns cannot work well. The black list of Opendns never blocks anything, no matter what you add in. I tried to block a game named "mope.io" by Opendns. Whatever I did for Opendns, my kid could still be happy to play the game again and again. It drove my crazy. The Netgear Parental controls is truely truely stupid. I am so disappointed with my Netgear router.
You could give those devices reserved IPs in LAN Settings but I do understand your point. There will be features in the next firmware that will particularly interest you as we're making some powerful features that should resolve your issues. I'd recommend you sign up here for the beta to get a chance to try them http://www.netgearinnovation.com/dumaos-beta/index.html
