thenational.academy Vimeo Videos

[robyholmes]

Hi All,

 

It seems the https://www.thenational.academy/ website hosts it's videos on the Vimeo service which we have blocked. We'd like to avoid unblocking Vimeo as the content isn't always appropriate but I'm struggling to think of a solution to this issue. I know MathsWatch had the same problem and they now host videos on their own servers (Although you do have to request it and its done off IP access).

 

Just wondering if you've hit this issue and what you decide to do about it?

 

Thanks, Rob

[localzuk]

The only way we get around it is we unblock individual videos.

[robyholmes]

The only way we get around it is we unblock individual videos.

 

Could you expand on exactly how you did this? Did you have to unblock certain 'General' URLs for the video player itself and then each video URL?

[localzuk]

It really depends on your filtering solution. With Securly you can literally unblock the URL in question and it does the rest with CDNs and the like. With Sophos XG, we also had to unblock the following:

 

^[A-Za-z0-9.-]*\.vimeocdn\.com

^vimeo.com\/api\/

 

So, for example an individual embedded video would be added on Sophos as

 

^player\.vimeo\.com\/video\/417655233

[MatthewL]

Each video has its own unique link as well as vimeo.com and vimeocdn.com to unblock.

 

We have taken a decision not to allow due to some of the content on there and to white list individual videos its to much admin. Video are to be hosted on the platform that is hosting stuff or we don't allow it.

[robyholmes]

Has anyone with a Smoothwall done this and if so do you have the list of URLs you used? I'm sure others would love to have them if you have. Otherwise I might have a go at creating a list if I get time later this week or next.

[ITGuyNW]

Not completely foolproof but maybe enough with numbers low in School. Is it worth allowing Vimeo through the filter however ban the word "Vimeo" from tab names in Impero. So they can still use the built in videos on Oak Academy but they will get their window closed if they go to Vimeo itself?

[localzuk]

Not completely foolproof but maybe enough with numbers low in School. Is it worth allowing Vimeo through the filter however ban the word "Vimeo" from tab names in Impero. So they can still use the built in videos on Oak Academy but they will get their window closed if they go to Vimeo itself?

The issue doing that would be that most vimeo videos are played via embedded sites. So, that method would leave all embedded Vimeo videos working.

[jmak]

If only there was a British Corporation Broadcasting education resources with a video streaming platform with built in agree appropriateness ratings/restrictions [emoji849]

[gtg93]

We had the same issue for SATs Companion via censornet/ussgateway and had to unblock the individual URLs which they supplied to us (fortunately!)

 

URLs looked like this: https://player.vimeo.com/video/145127861

 

I have the full list if anyone would find it useful. Won't insert them here as not to hijack the thread but thought the above info might be useful.

[Sheridan]

I've got the same issue, I don't want to unblock vimeo as its easy to find inappropriate content and our smoothwall won't allow anything other than URL whitelists, and the national academy contact page simply says 'Oak National Academy has been put together quickly, so unfortunately our enquiries email address is not up and running yet.'

 

Why do 'education' sites insist on putting their videos on hosts that aren't designed for educational use? It took me 2 seconds to find something way inappropriate on vimeo

[paulkerton]

Why do 'education' sites insist on putting their videos on hosts that aren't designed for educational use? It took me 2 seconds to find something way inappropriate on vimeo

 

Because to these businesses, it's the cheapest solution for hosting video online without them being plastered with promotional advertising. It's a PITA, but they have to make a business decision. It's a lot cheaper than self-hosting, and cheaper than Wistia, or Vidyard, which they've probably not heard of.

[Sheridan]

Because to these businesses, it's the cheapest solution for hosting video online without them being plastered with promotional advertising. It's a PITA, but they have to make a business decision. It's a lot cheaper than self-hosting, and cheaper than Wistia, or Vidyard, which they've probably not heard of.

 

I understand the budget side of things, but do they not realise that we have to unblock Vimeo totally to get it to work, and really quite nasty stuff is one search away? They’re better off putting it on YouTube where there is at least some kind of control

[paulkerton]

I understand the budget side of things, but do they not realise that we have to unblock Vimeo totally to get it to work, and really quite nasty stuff is one search away? They’re better off putting it on YouTube where there is at least some kind of control

Until recently though, YouTube videos would be covered in adverts. Now that they won't carry ads against content designed for kids that's different, but I'm guessing the decisions made for most of these companies happened before that. Oak National though, well that's a different kettle of fish. That didn't even start being created till April, after the advert changes.

[HappyAdmin]

We've taken the decision to allow Vimeo embedded videos but not the Vimeo site itself. This isn't perfect, of course, but it is likely that inappropriate videos are embedded in sites that will be blocked anyway.

 

I've done this on Netsweeper by taking the list in the Smoothwall article that is easily found with a Google search, and then just adding 1 entry that turned out to be needed in our case.

I make no warranty as to the correctness of this list, but I'm putting it here in case it is useful to anyone as a starting point, and I can confirm that it is, on top of our standard setup, having the desired affect as described at the head of my post.

Allowing the following:

 

player.vimeo.com/crossdomain.xmlav.vimeo.com/crossdomain.xmla.vimeocdn.com/p/2.1.18/js/player.jsvimeocdn.coma.vimeocdn.com/p/2.1.18/css/player.cssplayer.vimeo.com/play_redirectplayer.vimeo.com/video/vimeo.com/api/

 

Ben

[Sheridan]

Which was the extra entry you had to add for Netsweeper?

 

The smoothwall article only works if you a) don't have vimeo.com blocked (such as in Core Blocked audio and video) and b) you whitelist each individual video URL

[HappyAdmin]

The last one, with /api/

As I say, I just started from the Smoothwall article - I did understand that it was intended for unblocking individual videos, but it seemed likely to give something of a shortcut to what we were trying to do.

[Sheridan]

Cheers, I'll give that a try as I'm sick of being seen as just the one who blocks 'education resources'

 

Sometimes I'd love to sit one of them down and demonstrate how quickly I can see a wildly inappropriate video within the first search page on vimeo!

[smarties11]

Has anyone with a Smoothwall done this and if so do you have the list of URLs you used? I'm sure others would love to have them if you have. Otherwise I might have a go at creating a list if I get time later this week or next.

 

@robyholmes - this is the article you need to follow for SmoothWall. We're not using Oak in School however we do use Hegarty maths which has hundreds and hundreds of Vimeo videos and this is the guide I followed for our SmoothWall which worked great.

 

https://kb.smoothwall.com/hc/en-us/articles/360002033410-Allowing-Access-to-View-Embedded-Vimeo-Videos

 

TIP: you can easily put together a spreadsheet in Excel that will create the right text for you to go into SmoothWall after entering a Vimeo ID. Create a new spreadsheet. In A1, type the vimeo ID. in B1, type ="player.vimeo.com/video/"&A1. In C1 type ="player.vimeo.com/video/"&A1. Then you can fill the formulas down and simply type in all the Vimeo IDs or copy and paste them if Oak provide a list like Hegarty do. Then in Smoothwall, you can switch to the full text editor in the rules and paste the whole lot in one go rather than creating each one individually.

 

HTH

[Sheridan]

Thats worked - just the /api url seems to work without allowing direct access to vimeo.com

 

Obviously its a bit of a flawed way to do this on smoothwall anyway, as it will allow cut and paste of urls but its a workaround

[smarties11]

Thats worked - just the /api url seems to work without allowing direct access to vimeo.com

 

Obviously its a bit of a flawed way to do this on smoothwall anyway, as it will allow cut and paste of urls but its a workaround

 

How do you mean it's flawed? It's quite a clever feature on SmoothWall I think - the URL patterns basically means it will only allow the main URLs (vimeocdn.com etc) IF the pattern matches, and as you are only putting individual IDs in the patterns this means you give access to ONLY the videos you want, not the whole of vimeo? The only thing you are doing for the whole of vimeo is turning on HTTPS inspection. You don't need to do that bit if you already decrypt and inspect everything.

 

You can do the same with YouTube on SmoothWall too.

Edited June 10, 2020 by smarties11

[markwilfan]

So Just to confirm I have made a policy with

 

a.vimeocdn.com/p/2.1.18/css/player.css
a.vimeocdn.com/p/2.1.18/js/player.js
av.vimeo.com/crossdomain.xml
player.vimeo.com/crossdomain.xml
player.vimeo.com/log
player.vimeo.com/play_redirect
player.vimeo.com/video/*
vimeo.com/api
vimeocdn.com

 

I've allowed it for everybody

 

Now we have access to vimeo embedded vids but not vimeo.com itself.

 

Edit: changed vimeo.com/api/* to vimeo.com/api

Edited June 29, 2020 by markwilfan

[m_m]

Has anyone managed to gather a list of Oak Academy video ID's? The only way I can find to do it is to go through every page on their website and inspect element to get the Vimeo ID's. It's infuriating that they don't have contact details. Normally I contact the website owner and request a list of Vimeo ID's, format them and then drop them into Smoothwall.

[ITGuyNW]

Just an update on this, they responded to one of my tweets and they reckon they will be self hosting videos from September because of the Vimeo issue.

[robyholmes]

Just an update on this, they responded to one of my tweets and they reckon they will be self hosting videos from September because of the Vimeo issue.

 

Great news. I guess someone has the job over summer of re-uploading and linking them all.