sidewinder Posted January 8, 2008 Author Posted January 8, 2008 Situation is the same on Websense with West Sussex Grid for Learning. Exactly the same - worked for about half an hour this morning, then blocked. Also, old forums worked fine. Yeah that doesnt surprise me, West Sussex use LGFL/Atomwide as well don't they?
zag Posted January 8, 2008 Posted January 8, 2008 Surely you can request individual sites to be unblocked? This is a basic function of any web filtering system!
localzuk Posted January 8, 2008 Posted January 8, 2008 Surely you can request individual sites to be unblocked? This is a basic function of any web filtering system! Those were my thoughts exactly. I'd be causing a storm if I couldn't. If you can get your head to write a letter that may help, else try the official complaints procedure for your RBC.
Geoff Posted January 8, 2008 Posted January 8, 2008 Unfortunately some RBC/LEA filters are in the stone age (and if this thread doesn't serve as an example as why url filters sucks, I don't know what does).
zag Posted January 8, 2008 Posted January 8, 2008 Its pretty amazing that you cant do it, our school would grind to a halt if I couldn't unblock sites immediately.
richard.thomas Posted January 8, 2008 Posted January 8, 2008 Everything seems to be fine here now. I'm at one of the primary schools at the moment, but it's in the same 'cloud' as the secondary school I'm based at, and I'm using the same proxy so I guess either someone else in Sandwell has requested for it to be unblocked, or someone that works for them didn’t like being blocked. I just did some testing. It seems that "edugeek.net" is infact blocked; however, "www.edugeek.net" is not blocked. I always knew netsweeper was bad and let the kids get around it easily... But that's just stupid!
ZeroHour Posted January 8, 2008 Posted January 8, 2008 We have a example of blocking here at BETT so I will be developing a fix very soon. Hopefully will be live tomorrow for you all
crc-ict Posted January 8, 2008 Posted January 8, 2008 Yeah that doesnt surprise me, West Sussex use LGFL/Atomwide as well don't they? Oh, God, yes.
sidewinder Posted January 8, 2008 Author Posted January 8, 2008 Its pretty amazing that you cant do it, our school would grind to a halt if I couldn't unblock sites immediately. I know, its ridiculous, and I can see why some people here cant believe it. It USED to be better than this, there was a clear system to either block or unblock a site, and although it still had to go through someone, the request was normally granted as long as it was sensible. But since they upgraded their filter and support site, its been a complete nightmare. Theres a student policy and a staff policy which can be applied to specific IP's. Some things such as forums can be unblocked on the staff policy, but thats it...NO individual sites can be unblocked anymore, just a few select categories. That is, until they provide the tools to allow individual schools to customise their filtering, these were supposed to be put in place to co-incide with the filter upgrade, but nearly a year later, we have a more restrictive filter and NO tools...and all we get when we ask is 'its being discussed' Its a disgrace that we pay for this pathetic service, but Ive not heard of any other schools complaining. Perhaps thats because there have been no proper WAN meetings for a year either, so no-one can even air their grievences If I had the authority to make the decision, I would withdraw at the first possible oppourtunity, get ADSL in and do it ourselves. We're paying god knows how much for a service that the IT staff, teachers, and students all get annoyed with
ZeroHour Posted January 10, 2008 Posted January 10, 2008 Can users please test /frms/ as the url for the forums. Please let me know what you does not work. Frontpage links will not work yet and neither will chat. If you confirm that gets around of a lot of issues I will write the rule for the chat page. Cheers
Edu-IT Posted January 10, 2008 Posted January 10, 2008 Can users please test /frms/ as the url for the forums. Please let me know what you does not work. Frontpage links will not work yet and neither will chat. If you confirm that gets around of a lot of issues I will write the rule for the chat page. Cheers Am I doing something wrong? I get a 404 Not Found page. http://www.edugeek.net/frms
localzuk Posted January 10, 2008 Posted January 10, 2008 There is a difference between /frms and /frms/ The prior (which probably won't be subject to the rewrite rule) returns a 404, the latter a 500 server error.
ZeroHour Posted January 11, 2008 Posted January 11, 2008 Sorry about that, the joy of mod_rewrite Try http://www.edugeek.net/frms/index.php Good luck
Edu-IT Posted January 11, 2008 Posted January 11, 2008 Sorry about that, the joy of mod_rewrite Try http://www.edugeek.net/frms/index.php Good luck After I turned the computer off last night I thought about doing that but couldn't be bothered to turn the computer back on again. The site isn't blocked here, surprisingly, so I can't test it for you.
sidewinder Posted January 14, 2008 Author Posted January 14, 2008 The new url does work here, thankyou Lets hope they dont block this one..seems unlikely though
Geoff Posted January 14, 2008 Posted January 14, 2008 If your LEA/RBC are inept enough to fail to remove sites from their blacklists, it's unlikely they have the wit to add them either.
DSapseid Posted January 14, 2008 Posted January 14, 2008 Situation is the same on Websense with West Sussex Grid for Learning. Exactly the same - worked for about half an hour this morning, then blocked. Also, old forums worked fine. You can indeed have unfiltered IPs, (well, 'Technician' filter which allows useful stuff but still keeps the more 'exotic' stuff at bay) which works fine if you only work in one school and have your own PC. I work in nine, and have to grab whatever computer I can! I to have had it blocked in ie since we came back after xmas but it worked in ff until thursday /friday. I have since added a rule on the atomwide support site to alow this site through as an exception.
ZeroHour Posted January 14, 2008 Posted January 14, 2008 Cool, I am going to work on a script to autodetect blocking and rewrite the urls so users can easily get into the forums. Cheers for the feedback
sidewinder Posted January 20, 2008 Author Posted January 20, 2008 I have since added a rule on the atomwide support site to alow this site through as an exception. How do you do that?? Pretty sure we dont have the ability, which seems weird as we have the same provider?
DSapseid Posted January 21, 2008 Posted January 21, 2008 @ sidewinder - our lea/atomwide give us full control over what sites we do see/dont see if we fill in appropriate forms saying that it is at our risk etc. The only categories that are permantly blocked are adult and chat i think! It might be worth speaking with atomwide or with your lea it schools helpdesk.
Jon Posted January 21, 2008 Posted January 21, 2008 In my LEA Norfolk the new edugeek site is being blocked by Symantec Web Sercuity Dynamic Web Filtering... Most of the forum threads are reporting a DDR score of around 50. Very ocasionally the old site would be filtered, but now it is every thread, most threads will display the first 1 or 2 topics and the rest of the thread is filtered, but it seems more and more threads are not displaying any topics at all. Any suggestions on how I can get around this are most welcome.
ZeroHour Posted January 21, 2008 Posted January 21, 2008 Can you submit a screenshot of the effect please. Cheers
GrumbleDook Posted January 21, 2008 Posted January 21, 2008 In my LEA Norfolk the new edugeek site is being blocked by Symantec Web Sercuity Dynamic Web Filtering... Most of the forum threads are reporting a DDR score of around 50. Very occasionally the old site would be filtered, but now it is every thread, most threads will display the first 1 or 2 topics and the rest of the thread is filtered, but it seems more and more threads are not displaying any topics at all. Any suggestions on how I can get around this are most welcome. SWS is similar to Smoothwall and a few other filters. It relies on looking at the text on the page as well as the url it originates from, and there are certain words which have a high score. Within the code generated by vBulletin there are certain things that get caught. The only way around it is to have certain other words flagged with a negative score. Ask for the word 'EduGeek' to have a negative score of -250 (the maximum if I remember rightly) and it solves the problem.
Jon Posted January 22, 2008 Posted January 22, 2008 Zerohour, Here are a couple of screenshots of the problem with Symantec Dynamic filtering I am experiencing
GrumbleDook Posted January 22, 2008 Posted January 22, 2008 Yep, definitely some words within the page or within the code getting caught by the dictionary. Give Norfolk a call and ask them to set the word EduGeek to a score that will offset the score from words such as 'forum' and so on.
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