Life of the Webmaster
A month or so ago I got a mail from a reader who couldn't access this site from work. Not the first time it's happened and not the first time I've told somebody to contact their IT admin team and request it be unblocked. I thought nothing more of it and was relieved to hear back from said reader that, following a call to the admin guys, it has magically become unblocked with no explanation offered. Such is the mysterious world of site blacklisting, where people sit categorising websites all day, probably with little understanding of what the actual content may be.
Today, I read on Dan Gillmor's eJournal that he had suffered a similar fate, at the hands of SurfControl. Curiosity got the better of me and I checked this site's listing. Lo and behold, I am classed as Usenet News. Probably the most likely of categories to be banned by Big Brother.
My guess is that whoever classed the site saw one thing - the blog. I wondered what other censorware companies classed me as and so paid WebSense a visit. Only to find that you can't check what they think of your site without handing over a working none-hotmail-type email address that they send a password too. They have to be joking.
I realise this is a slightly pointless blog entry, in that people who can't read can't read it and will know no better. I only hope some people read it at home instead and may be able to take the issue up with the Ministry of Information at their place of work. All that I can do is submit the request that my site be reclassified. As if the life of the webmaster isn't hard enough as it is...
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Isn't this web blocking lark a bit like when famous people have a stalker - it's a sign you've made it :)
We use Websense here, and it's barmy. It puts things like horoscopes under "Non-Traditional Religions and Occult and Folklore" instead of "Entertainment", and for some reason my company blocks "Cultural Institutions" such as theatres, but allows Cinemas through. Yet lots of sites that should be blocked are not. Can you imagine having a job whereby you have to visit and categorise sites 8 hours a day? "Hey boss, should I put this one under 'Abhorrent Sexual Practices' or 'Entertainment'?"
Jake, regarding sites that require non-hotmail e-mail addresses - do like I do. You have your own server.
I have a dilbert@myowndomain.dk and a spamthis@myowndomain.dk and so on.
Create an e-mail database and a person document pointing to it, put some names into the shortnames field, and Bob's your uncle.
Recently I put up such an e-mail account just for testing if spambots would find it. I left the address in some visibility:hidden html in an article on a public website. The database that receives e-mails for that address has a nice counter waiting for the explosion :-)
FYI Jens : Yahoo mail offers this service now :
in addition to your current yahoo email address you may create as many "spam addresses" that will receive your spam mails if one uses the address you entered in a site, then after weeks you delete the temporary address and that's done, you may therefore keep your first yahoo address safe.
eg : francois_webmail-job@yahoo.com is just a temporary address, but it takes shorter time to create and delete when not needed than create a new email at home.
I could create francois_webmail-codestore@yahoo.com the same way.
(unfortunately my office doesn't allow webmail server to be accessed :-(
For info: Codestore.net is blocked here (large UK insurer) but not Codestore.org so it is not a content "thing"
Ahah! That must explain it. How bizarre that you fall under the "Usenet news" umbrella. These companies really must take responsibility for what they are doing. If you were running a business that was inadvertantly blocked that could cost you dear. Are you going to see if there is some form of appeals process where an actual human being (gasp!) checks out your sites content?
By the way, though I never received a reply from our proxy admins I recently discovered that I am no longer blocked from ANY web sites at work. They must have put my in a "let him do what he wants" group to shut me up. Hurrah :-)
Ian. The fact that one domain's blocked and the other isn't doesn't mean it's not a content thing. Does it?
Ben. Good point. With codestore.net I am not really losing out by not having people access it. However, with my new company website - should I decide to be trendy and have a blog - I would hate to find it blocked. I'm sure i've read of lawsuits about this kind of thing...
Websense does not block codestore at work, but if I disable using a proxy server, Websense blocks everything, forcing the error message. Both codestore.net and codestore.com return this Websense category:
Reason: The Websense category "Information Technology" is filtered.