As of this morning, the workplace web filter BlueCoat has reclassified the SDMB as “Adult/Mature Content; Blogs/Personal Pages,” which means that I can no longer access the site from work. I submitted an appeal using their web form but unfortunately it was denied. The main straightdope.com site is still accessible, so it’s just the message board that has been tagged as Adult.
Given the fact that I can still see the forums at Something Awful (whose content is routinely far rougher than what is allowed here), it seems odd that we’re suddenly getting labeled as Adult based on what people are posting – my guess is that BlueCoat’s spiders stumbled across some sketchy ads from our seedy ad provider. However, that’s of course only a guess, so I’m hoping the admins can contact BlueCoat and find out what led to the new categorization and what, if anything, can be done to change it back to the usual Forums/Message Boards.
Even if it’s too late to get off the BlueCoat blacklist (which would royally suck for me), it’s probably still worth exploring so as to avoid getting blocked by any of the other big web filters.
I can confirm this. As of this morning, I have no access at work to this site. Although I’m not sure if it’s the blog/personal that’s triggering the workplace filter or the Adult content that’s triggering this filter.
It does seem a bizarre decision. I can understand spiders being misled but surely the appeal is human-arbitrated and it beggars belief that the Something Awful boards would pass muster and SDMB wouldn’t. Let’s hope Ed and his minions can do something because this will adversely affect a great many Dopers.
click on the “Categories” tab
you’ll see a page that says this:
However, at the sitereview page, all they allow you to do is enter the name of their site so that they review it, as far as I can tell. You might need to talk to someone in customer support.
If they have a separate portal for webmasters I haven’t been able to find it. Supposedly I’ll get a reply within a day. If we get turned down I’ll appeal to the higher-ups at BlueCoat, whoever they might be. If anyone has further knowledge of this process, let me know.
It’s still blocked for me. I’ll also note that the date/time listed under Last Rating/Review is well before I noticed being blocked. It’s also before I submitted my appeal for reclassification, and was told that upon review it was denied due to adult content. So I’m not sure that info is completely up to date.
BigT was kind enough to PM me a suggestion for a workaround, though, which works – the link http://boardstest.straightdope.com/sdmb/ is not currently blocked. So other Dopers might want to use that while things get sorted out.
Interesting data point: I just typed in “boards.straightdope.com” into the BlueCoat review link that Bricker quoted and got the same result: the site is listed as Newsgroups/Forums. (With the same “last review/rated” timestamp.)
Not sure why the two would give different results, but that does pinpoint the SDMB as the source of the trouble rather than something else on the same domain…
