Small business website blocked by corporate servers - why?

usignuolo

My OH runs a bridge club and teaches bridge. He has a website which he hosts using his Pipex small business account. Until recently it was very successful at attracting new recruits to both games and lessons. Howerver the online enquiries have dried up over the last few months, and asking around he has been told by some existing members that his site is being blocked internally by their servers as a "personal" not a business site.

The site has quite a straightforward name, nothing untoward and not one which says anything about personal - it has the club name plus co uk. Does anyone know, is the blocking likely to be by automated software which picks up key words, like playing cards, or is there some other criterion used by software filters to block selected sites. It has only happened in the last few months and seems mainly to have been implemented by companies in the financial sector.

dacouch

They are probably blocking it as they think its a gambling website

Bongedone

A lot of companies use Websense. It sounds like that website would be blocked at my place of work also.

http://www.websense.com/content/WebFilter.aspx

usignuolo

A friend who works at one of the companies which has started blocking the OH's website has just sent OH an email saying:

"They use Websense here. They added Social Networking and Personal Sites to the blocked categories a few weeks ago. Because your site is hosted by pipex I imagine it falls into this category now."

OH's website is hosted via pipex and has an address of www.yourid@pipex.com/website name He is going to try using a directly registered website and address and see if that works.

eamon

Super keen net nanny url blockers do have their uses. Many companies are terrified of having any "illegal,suspect" activities going on via their PC's etc. You would probably have more success in appealing to the administrators than changing the url as the blocking software delves quite deep and will search for words, images that it doesn't like.

jackomdj

I have this problem a lot at work, do a lot of credit/company checks as part of my role but often the sites I am checking (those of potential new suppliers or contractors) are blocked by our filtering system.

crampo_2

You could try just hosting a normal page with just some text on it, if this works on the other end then you know why

esuhl

You would normally mark up a site with ICRA tags so that web filtering software knows whether it contains pornography, violence, gambling, etc. Many corporate websites will block anything that hasn't been tagged. More info here:

http://www.icra.org/webmasters/