Several of the users of one of my messageboards can’t access my site from work. They’re told when they try that the site falls under the category of “sex.” That itself isn’t a mystery, for several years ago I did have a directory with some naughty pictures in it. It seems likely, then, given that none of my current content is sexual in nature, that I ended up on a list of sex sites, and that the filtering software maintains lists of bad sites in the fashion of a virus definition file.
In an attempt to get around this, I switched IP and domain names. My mistake may have been to request that the bad domain name also point to the new IP. A few days after my suffering users had successfully logged in from work using the new domain name, they were again unable to access, and for the same reason.
Does anyone know why this is happening? My guess is that during the switchover, these users accessed the new IP with the old domain name, thereby linking the new IP to the tainted old domain.
Going forward, is there anything I can do? I’m willing to try another switch, this time parking the tainted domain on another machine. I just don’t want to pay another $40 and have it fail again.
“Hi, Mr. Administrator! I run a messageboard that used to have porn on it, but doesn’t any longer. Some of your employees want to screw around during business hours on my messageboard; could you remove the block from my site, so they can do so?”
I don’t see why not. I’m allowed to surf at my leisure at my job during business hours. We don’t have a content filter, but if we did it wouldn’t be a big deal to remove a site that was mistakenly put in the filter.
Then again, maybe it wasn’t mistakenly put in the filter in the OPs situation. Maybe the network admin looked at the log and saw that people were accessing the site too much when they shouldn’t have been. But, if the surfing is allowed and the OP’s site is legit, it shouldn’t be a problem.
FWIW on 9/11/01 I was out of the US. SDMB and Fathom were both blocked on my work machine.
I sent a nice e-mail to my computer people saying that this was how I was trying to stay connected to my friends during these trying times.
They pulled the block off and I could surf SDMB and Fathom again.
Sometimes the good guys win
