Like many offices, the church office has a content filter installed to make sure that nobody looks at bad stuff on t’Intarweb. We use the excellent DansGuardian (the author of which is attending LUGRadio Live at which point I shall buy him a beer).
I would like to suggest 2 tips for making sure that your site doesn’t get picked up by filtering software:
- Think before you name objects/pictures. Associated New Media, this means YOU! Renaming all of your title graphics to tit_pagename was not a clever idea…..
- Try not to use lots of senstive words in a single link. For example MOPS (the Mothers Of PreSchoolers website) has an image on the front page which includes both the word ‘teen’ and the word ‘love’ in the URL for a picture.
Content filtering is becoming more and more popular, and you should particularly think properly when building your website if you are producing a site for children, or for people to access from their work….
Here endeth the lesson.
mrBen
Which is why I’m no fan of filtering software. You need a parent/responsible individual to be able to assess a web site, not some software which arbitrarily decides what is reasonable.
I remember the Black Isle forums would filter out any mention of a cockpit. Luckily they tended to focus on RPGs but it made discussions about flights sims awkward. How do ornithologists cope when discussing tits?
Actually, dansguardian is a lot cleverer than that – it will rate pages based on the words, and you can alter the weighting if necessary. Cockpits would be fine, because it’s all one word (as would ‘title’). Additionally its not being used in a link to a graphic.
Content filtering is used a lot in businesses, and in families. Without it, a person would have to assess sites, and that would take _ages_. This way you reduce the risk of something getting through, and can easily assess the ones that get caught afterwards – a two tier strategy.
And ornithologists should use the latin names, duh!
It sounds as if dansguardian is doing a better job than the Norton Personal FIrewall AdBlocker – unfortunately it’s probably not as widely deployed. One lesson we learned was that site elements containing the string “banner” were being blocked by this software. It’s even worse if your CSS contains an undesirable keyword, ‘cos then your site just looks broken.