I work at a county agency and our access to the internet is protected by “Checkpoint”. Too many employees streaming videos or listening to Pandora, I guess. When you try to access a forbidden site, like CNN for instance, you get a “Access Denied” message along withe the category of denied sites. CNN is prohibited because it has links to videos. Anyway, I tried to get on the site of a vendor and it was denied as being “Tasteless”. There is nothing offensive, in the least, about the URL. I called our IT people about it and they said they have no idea how Checkpoint and the like determine what is tasteless or not. Any ideas? And, while we’re at it, how do they (the filters) know any particular site has links to videos, has anything to do with guns or violence or sex, etc?
It’s likely a combination of human-created lists of sites getting pretagged as forbidden, plus keyword searches of the page before it’s loaded into the browser.
As far as innocuous supplier’s site being labeled “tasteless”, my first guess is an electrical component supplier with a lot of “male-female” socket items listed.
A few mentions of “male” and “female” on a page might not get a site into a filter database, but dozens or hundreds of them could.
or it could have a tiled background and a lot of blink tags and gif animations. Those are pretty tasteless.
Our old filter at work used to block the SDMB as tasteless. I’d seen enough MPSIMS that I couldn’t argue.