Internet content filters - an alternative

[alan7736]

I used a commercial product for a year and found it very 'ok' espcially for the price. A student did manage to get porn - even thought the site itself was full of 'xxx porn' tags etc. Phones the company and they said ' these things happen - we will look into it...'. Two months later the same thing happened - Head was v.unimpressed and had an independent advisor to look at the setup. He noted I had done everything right but once again it did not do its job. Took the smoothwall and bloxx for trials. Both OK but also activated the content filter on the router. The latter was very effective and no cost (other than the router's purchase which was below 200 quid). Beside the reporting which, to me is not too difficult to do on the client machine's history, why do schools bother with these expensive devices?

[GrumbleDook]

Duty of care, flexibility, integration with your directory services (usually AD) ...

There is also the fact that if you are connected via an RBC you may have upstream filtering too ... that definitely also has an impact.

[matt40k]

I was thinking Smoothwall was Becta approved, meaning 100% porn blocked?

Personally the cost of content filtering is worth it, even if it's £1k for a server then £4k on licensing. The cost of not doing it could be your job! Just takes one parents complaining too.