Blocking Specific Pages

[Michael]

Hi everyone,

 

We currently use a Volera Proxy server which works ok most of the time, caching pages and multimedia as well as providing internal filtering, in addition to the LEA central filtering.

 

At our school (and I'm sure other schools) kids love online flash games. As nice as they are, they download all kinds of carp onto the machines and kids are hammering the keyboards on whatever game they're playing. I must have blocked hundreds (if not thousands) of these online flash gaming sites, but here's the problem -

 

http://www.miniclip.com (one of the most popular school searches) is blocked successfully, however on the BBC website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbbc/smile/games/index.shtml there are also flash games that I want to block, however I do not want to block http://www.bbc.co.uk as it contains many useful resources. So my question is, how can I block specific pages from the BBC website? TIA

[Geoff]

On some proxies you can block by mime type. In paticular you want to "blockapplication/x-shockwave-flash". An alternative method would be to block via file extension. In this case "swf".

 

If your proxy does not support either method, your screwed. Get a better proxy system. For example, Dansguardian can use either of the of the above methods and is open source.

[john]

With websense you can re-classify a sub site, so we can just block the sub-site that hosts the games. Until the beeb re-develop and mess about with there site again! They have moved the news pages images to another subsite again so they gave up working on the yes list again!

[Michael]

Thanks for the replies guys! That's exactly what I want to do John, block the sub site and not the root of the site.

 

It just baffles me how N2H2 categorise various pages.

 

The following site:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbbc/smile/games/index.shtml is categorised as Recreation/Entertainment, but http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbbc/games/index.shtml is categorised as Games They're extremely similar and both should be categorised as Games in my opinion! I've reported the sites in question, so hopefully a change will be made soon. If the BBC redesigned their site so it was games.bbc.co.uk (like most other sites) it makes things so much easier, as I can then block specific sub pages and not the root.

[john]

Yeah, that is one sub-site I would love the BBC to make, all those game onto one hosted area, and as its not a yes list approved site = no more games! Woo Hoo!