sigma

To reiterate, I'm not a Smoothwall customer at the moment. It is one of several very capable filters available. My interest is in maximising the efficiency of blocking, without over blocking regardless of the particular filter used. I cannot emphasise enought that https inspection is essential to give the fine grained control to achieve that. Games sites are no more than clickbait to get advertising clicks. In the worst cases, they serve infected adverts or use bandwidth stealers such as https://arc.io/ . The big sites such as crazygames earn a lot from their worldwide user base, even though the games are free to play. The games are designed to be addicitve and can lead their users onto more serious gaming and gambling. Some of the games are hosted on the domains they are played. They are easy to block Some are hosted on other games sites. For example, Bullet-Force on pacogames.com or coolgamesonline.co.uk is still loaded from crazygames.com. Others are loaded from games Content Delivey Networks that you won't see in a browser url so are a bit more work to block. Don't assume that blocking the url you see will block the game. There are also an increasing number of ever changing Web Proxies from the like of Nebula, Holy Unblocker and Interstellar that are now also loading or hosting these games directly for the Ad revenue. Blocking the ads can be key as some games won't load when the ads are blocked. Whatever you do to block games (and I do), its 100% whack-a mole.

Will this do?

I think we are OK as regards the broadband service is concerned. The lack of opening of support tickets in a timely manner continues to be an issue though.

You can of course use Impero to block (or monitor) access to system dumps and "other places they have no need to poke about" over and above Group Policy settings.

As well as observing it accessed when the games loads, its in available versions of source code eg: https://github.com/scheng123321/1v1-lol/blob/master/index.html https://pastebin.com/gMCNeTpS I can't find anything else other than games calling it.

Blocking: https://justbuild.nyc3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com seems to stop 1v1.lol and justbuild.lol games from loading past the spinning circle. I don't think it will break anything else, but I can't say I've tested extensivley. It seems to be the game developers CDN. Are these the right games or or there others?

For Bullet Force: Sorry, I'm not a recent Smoothwall user and now very rusty on how to set it up, so I have to ask: Is your block of grazygames.com "as defined" going to block all these or just http://www.crazygames.com? You need these to belt and braces block it. This will also block it for the other sites that host it. https://api.crazygames.com https://builds.crazygames.com https://files.crazygames.com https://gameframe.crazygames.com https://games.crazygames.com https://pafvertizing.crazygames.com https://videos.crazygames.com https://workers.crazygames.com

In addition to crazygames.com there are also following: https://www.crazygames.fi https://www.1001juegos.com https://www.crazygames.nl https://www.crazygames.se https://www.crazygames.co.id https://www.crazygames.ro https://www.crazygames.ru https://www.crazygames.com.ua https://www.crazygames.cz https://www.crazygames.dk https://de.crazygames.com https://www.crazygames.fr https://it.crazygames.com https://www.crazygames.hu https://www.crazygames.no https://www.crazygames.pl https://www.crazygames.com.br https://vn.crazygames.com https://tr.crazygames.com https://gr.crazygames.com https://www.crazygames.com.ua https://ar.crazygames.com https://th.crazygames.com https://kids.crazygames.com

iubenda.com is the accept/reject cookie processing element on the site.

Looks like the games are behind CloudFlare.

Have you tried loading the game into urlscan.io a sandbox which will tell you all domains that are called? Just tried it, nothing odd. Any games in particular that are not getting blocked?

Everything looks present and correct here, and custom changes still in place.

I presume you mean SBB Netsweeper? Yes, I had problems yesterday afternoon and presume I still do. I rasied a support ticket which got a very quick response, to say that there were problems, and we would get an update when there was any news. SBB are already urgently on the case. I eagerly await an update in the SBB HUB on the Status Portal so I don't have to pester them.

I've tried different filters and not seen anything fail it, yet, I know there are some very obvious things that are not being blocked that should be.

Yes, it works that way for us.

Well, that worked for 2 days, and 8 hours later, not even acknowledgement of the support ticket.

You could use Macros, or for a quick and dirty, Sort and Filter - "custom sort". Assuming there is only one parent one per pupil: Sort by: Parent Name Student. Block delete everything after the last parent one entry.

My paternal Grandfather was in the Home Guard. They got up to all sorts of stuff apparently.

Looks fixed and back to normal. Many thanks to SBB for that. Whilst accepting that there will always be issues, SBB would show themselves in a much better light if they were a bit more pro-active when a problem affects multiple users particularly noting that anything related to "safeguarding" is not trivial. Nothing was reported regarding this issue on the Hub Status Portal. Had it been, it would have eliminated at least one support ticket and saved customer and supplier time in raising and responding to it.

Apparently, this is affecting multiple schools and has been escalated to Netsweeper. I could take an educated guess about the problem...

Still not working here. Do they take safeguarding seriously I wonder? (They did respond to my ticket within an hour of me posting the problem here. It was still over 24 hours after it was raised though).

Yes, I had to do that for a few years. Did you also have the room where there was only space for 3 desks and chairs but there were 4 of you?

To sort out problems with purchases without a fuss.

Our scheduled reports have stopped running yet again. For us this is the safeguarding blocked requests and search keyword reports. They last ran on Friday. Ticket raised on Monday 8:45am and I'm staill awaiting a response. Anyone else having this problem?

The only other thing that I might have done at the time was to make sure my browser was up to date. It was otherwise transitory