# Any reason why there are sudden reports of my IP address being "NSFW"?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-reason-why-there-are-sudden-reports-of-my-ip-address-being-nsfw/185607>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [July 1, 2003, 5:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-reason-why-there-are-sudden-reports-of-my-ip-address-being-nsfw/185607 "2003-07-01T17:15:42Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Larry\_Mudd](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/f14d63/32.png) [@Larry\_Mudd](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Larry_Mudd)\
**Post date:** [July 1, 2003, 5:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-reason-why-there-are-sudden-reports-of-my-ip-address-being-nsfw/185607/1 "2003-07-01T17:15:42Z")

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Over in [this thread](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=194536), at least three people have reported that their work web-filters are rejecting links to images on my webserver. This has never happened before, and I’m wondering why.

**samarm** says that it specifically says “You have attempted to access a site containg offensive material…” There’s nothing offensive on my webpage.

The links are hard links direct to images, using my IP address (too cheap to register a domain name.) I thought that this might be the problem, but I’ve done this hundreds of times before without causing any grief for anyone.

How does most filtering software work? I guess I always just imagined a proxy server with a database of “no-no” URLs. Do some use more sophisticated logical arguments?

For example, is it possible that, as far as the filter is concerned, a link which has no URL, AND is to a folder named “pics”, AND has a referring page which contains the term “homosexual” is simply too dodgy to risk?

How can I prevent this from happening? Do I _have_ to cough up the dough to register “[OhforchrissakesImnotapronographer.com](http://OhforchrissakesImnotapronographer.com)”?

Not that it’s practical in this case, but if such sloppy profiling is taking place, what recourse does someone have? (I mean, _besides_ locating the distributor of the offending software and giving them a good beating with a bar of soap in a sock.)

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**Author:** ![Dogface](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/9d8465/32.png) [@Dogface](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dogface)\
**Post date:** [July 1, 2003, 5:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-reason-why-there-are-sudden-reports-of-my-ip-address-being-nsfw/185607/2 "2003-07-01T17:22:30Z")

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It is fairly dimwitted “profiling” going on. I’ve come across Church-based pages that were classified as “adult” because they mentioned “Whore of Babylon”. Likewise, I put up a page once that was classified pretty far up as “occult” or “adult” because it had the word “alchemy” in it–it was actually my edition of a 15th-century work about extracting essences from nuts, fruits, etc…