johnsw16

E2BN Protex are investigating this at the moment with our LA members - we have a proposed solution to the issue which (currently) only really affects those schools that use various other Google services which require authentication. We will be implementing this over the weekend. If you are in our region more information will be coming out shortly.

PS: if you have any of the IDs you were given when you submitted a request can you forward a couple to me so I can check what action was taken. In theory any positive action should have a reply - but we do get some mail bounced back from LA mail services so I want to see whether a reply was actually sent but not received or whether not reply was made by us at all. Thanks. (mail off list to [email protected])

Thanks for the vote of confidence! The page you mention is for the older version which (as you are from Essex and have a test box) you do not have. I am at this very moment writing some new documentation for Protex v2. V1 had not set up to do really other than installing it so this page was just to explain the general policy and the admin interface which is mostly just adding and deleting URLs from the local list. The new version does take a bit more setting up - if you want NTLM authentication - and this is what I writing now. Also we are planning to set up some training sessions soon. I take on board the comment forms: in general the handling is done outside E2BN and we get the problematic ones to vet and deal with. I'll get on the the people who do this and reiterate the point about feeding back when changes are made and, if not, why not.

We have found the pupils comments very valuable in picking up sites that should be unblocked - and they are usually more proactive than staff who may not bother sending in a form. Not quite sure what you mean by this: the IP address of the server can be anything as long as we have the relevant details to allow secure access to our management systems. So, for example, users have external IP addresses, 10-dot E2BN addresses, or private addresses behind a NAT. If a user submits a form from the block page then this can, indeed, be tracked back to an individual cache but this may not be a school one - more often that not, however, it will be the central LA caches. Also the request to block page can be submitted from anywhere. V2 is already being deployed in school based systems allowing, for example, integration with a local AD. Hmm - I think I must beg to differ - we have over 32,000 logged requests to show that they do work! We have never been happy about this either! This was an issue with the Appliansys Cachebox - the newer ones (v3.12) come with ssh which is much better. Regards.

Can you let me know what sites you are talking about and when the requests were made so I can look through the database? We have had very little trouble with porn as the content checking is very efficient with these sites: in all the Becta tests that have been run against Protex we have scored 100% on detecting porn sites.

I've just been directed to this thread so I've joined just so I can reply on E2BN's behalf... The forms do work - we get a steady stream of requests to block/unblock sites for staff and pupils both via both the online form and the "block page" form link. We try to be as open as we can regarding unblocking sites and during the normal school week to action requests within 24hours. All the days changes are updated overnight to all the servers in the Protex system. Because of the potential volumes and the sometimes less that temperate language some forms are ignored. Other forms may be incomplete or have incorrectly formatted e-mail addresses - these are automatically ignored. Finally, some replies are bounced from commercial and LA mail systems because they see them as spam or contain inappropriate language. If you have tried so make submissions and they have not been acted upon or you've not had a reponse (and you've had no reply) then you can mail the filtering team directly on [email protected]: but this is not the place to make requests for blocking or unblocking - these must go via the online forms so that they can be logged.