To ask someone to tell me the dangers of DS giving out public IP address

[BlueEyesWhiteDragon]

DS2 wants to set up his own Pixelmon server for him and his friends.

I'm tech minded enough to understand the basics and so I followed a YouTube video and set it up. However for his friends to join they have to have his (our) public IP address.

They are all 16 so relatively sensible and aware of the dangers of Internet kerfuffle I assume but I have never met half of them (new friends late on secondary) so I have no idea if they can / can't be trusted.

I googled dangers of giving out public IP address and it seems to be either noooooo don't do it, hackers could steal your soul or well its not great but if you firewalled and you trust people it's not the end of the world.

I'm confused so could someone in the know help me out

YABU - do not do this under any circumstances
YANBU - it'll be fine

So do you have a firewall? And any sort of security?

@ChrimboGateauxCatto currently just the Windows defender firewall (it's a new PC he's had for Xmas) but the rest have Mcafee on and I can put it on unlimited devices so we usually put that on? Not sure how good it is / isn't though.

If you are sharing it withing a private circle then should be ok, also the thing with Virgin, Sky or BT when you reboot your router it usually gets assigned a new public ip anyway. If you turn your router off for about 20 mins (to be safe) then when to boot it back up it usually has a new public IP.

If he is savvy enough then if you buy a subscription to a VPN provider like PIA you can have port forwarding on that and it also gives you what is technically a disposable ip.

@ASB123 I'm not sure we savvy enough for a VPN but I will look into it!

Our ISP is Virgin. I thought the IP address was fixed from them but if I can change it by just turning the router off overnight then I can perhaps agree for him to give it a go and then if I have any concerns change it and not let it happen again.

Sometimes I miss the days of dial up where you just went on at a snails pace for an hour!

And what if he falls out with one of his friends and they decide to DDoS him?

@Cloudfrost wouldn't that be fixed by resetting the router and getting a new IP address.

Is seems like the most sensible thing to do might be to see if turning the router off for 30 mins gives us a new IP address (or see if I can figure out a VPN) or look at paying for him to have a server but they seem really expensive!

Looks like my reply has been put for moderation. I more or less said what would be the use of doing DDoS on a residential ip? Worst it will do is just crash the crappy Virgin Router and it will reboot itself... Not like he's an enterprise critical system hosting a website 😂

Tbf as an individual user, there isn't really much they can DO with your IP address even if they have a mind to. As long as you have a decent firewall you'll be fine. And you should have a good firewall regardless, thats just basic Internet security for dummies.

Like a pp said, worse case is they DDOS it, crash the router and it reboots with a new ip.

@ASB123

The use? They are teenagers so just creating hassle and annoyance would be sufficient I suppose? Or just as a prank, or even just cause they can?
If you work at home that could be a hassle

In any case, it's probably wisest to use VPN