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February 8, 2008

Is my site blocked? ()

by fluffy at 10:56 AM
Does anyone know if there's anywhere I can check to see what sort of web content filter blocklists my site is on and for what reasons? I don't actually suspect that it is (and even if it is it's not like my site is a vitally-important thing or whatever), but I'm curious.

I figure that at the least there's some blocking due to profanity, "alternative religion" (i.e. atheism!), and perhaps because of the occasional talk about sexuality and drugs and what have you.

Basically it's a bit surprising that apparently the only way to find out if your site is blocked is to run a web filter which blocks it, or to get emailed by someone who does, anyway. Maybe some of the more common filters have a "check my site" page but I really have no idea what software is out there that's commonly-used.

Comments

#10439 02/08/2008 12:56 pm
The most popular filtering software I know of offhand is Websense. I can't find anywhere to check whether a site is filtered by it, though.
#10440 02/08/2008 02:03 pm
Websense supposedly has a site lookup tool but you have to have an account to use it.
#10441 02/08/2008 07:33 pm
Well, it makes sense, otherwise other web filters could work by just looking it up in Websense's online tool.

Fortunately, bugmenot's login works, and Websense classifies beesbuzz.biz as a "social networking and personal" site (which seems to be the case for the whole site, not just the blog), which I guess isn't too far off-base.

My various band sites aren't classified at all, and neither is Schadenfood.

Incidentally, Portal of Evil is an "alternative journal," poe-news is "entertainment," and the few other sites I thought to put in seem to similarly be classified more or less reasonably.
#10447 02/11/2008 08:50 am
Not blocked by my workplaces's Blue Coat web filter.
#10452 02/11/2008 11:09 am
Actually websense is what they use here at work for filtering. I know that you can set different levels of filtering for it. I can get to your site, but not myspace or facebook (are those different categories from your "social networking and personal"?). At some point they had screwed up and basically filtered everything, which was really annoying. But that was an error.
-bill
#10453 02/12/2008 12:21 am
Hm, nope, they're all classified as 92981. There must be another layer of filtering going on, like maybe it's up to your IT staff to review the number of hits to decide which ones should actually be blocked?

EDIT: Oh, 92981 is the database version, not the classifier. I can't tell if there's a finer-grained subclassification.