Posted by biocore 635 days ago
Category: Content filtering | Tags: domain blocking adult-theme blocking
I love the adult blocking features of OpenDNS, but I am still not 99.99% happy with the service. During my viewing hours on the internet I stumble upon certain sites that are still open widely, and are yet of the adult type sites.

My suggestion is that along with use St. Bernard Software, why don't we also allow users to somehow submit domains to that company so that they can offer an even better service. I am sure that million's of users are a much more effective team combined with a company.

Thanks for considering.
comments 13 Comments  

Comments

written by Mark 631 days ago Rating: 0 | Rate Comment: + -

You can do this now at this URL: http://www.opendns.com/support/adult/

But I could see the potential for this to be more integrated for ease.

written by Larry Gilbert 606 days ago Rating: 2 | Rate Comment: + -

This is done now, I think?

written by ed84md 593 days ago Rating: 1 | Rate Comment: + -

yes we are allowed to submit adult domains to opendns but...are they being added to St. Bernard Software? I went to their website and there isn't anything that would let web users submit adult/porn/Nudity/phising websites, to their block list. I guess we should all email St. Bernard Software and ask for this feature on their website.

written by sparko 584 days ago Rating: 0 | Rate Comment: + -

"all email them and ask?"

That would be an interesting campaign

written by bnicodemus 537 days ago Rating: 5 | Rate Comment: + -

Overall, I think OpenDNS is a great idea and a great service. I am however very disappointed with their responsiveness to requests to block Adult theme sites. I completely understand the logic behind having people "vote" on whether a site should be blocked, and I know I can block individual domains, but this really is a naive and incomplete solution. I am using OpenDNS for several schools and non-profits and continue to see large numbers of Adult theme web sites slipping through the OpenDNS cracks and consider this to be COMPLETELY UNACCEPTABLE !!!!!

What I am seeing by examining the firewall logs is kids using search engines to search for adult sites and then clicking on every search result until they find something that slips by OpenDNS. Out of curiousity, I tried this myself and confirmed that it works every time. As web sites pay to get to the top of Google's search list, it is easy for the sites to be discovered once they come online.

Adult sites are a dime-a-dozen and growing by the hundreds every day and I completely understand it is a challenge to keep up with flood, but OpenDNS really needs to do better. Simply waiting around for others to vote on whether an Adult site should be blocked after someone has identified it as such is simply an unacceptable business practice.

A very simple solution to this problem exists: Setup thesystem such that ANY TIME a user tags a site as having an Adult theme, an email or alert is AUTOMATICALLY AND IMMEDIATELY SENT TO A LIVING ADMNIISTRATOR. All the administrator has to do is click on the link to INSTANTANEOUSLY view the site, visually confirm its Adult content, a click a button that tags it and blocks it. This will eliminate days, weeks, and possibly months of delay between when the time one OpenDNS customer identifies the site and alerts OpenDNS, and the time it takes for enough customers to actually take the time to search through the community tools to vote on the site.

Right now there are some 1,300 Adult theme sites tagged and sitting in their stupid voting queue. Are customers expected to go through all 1,300 sites and vote on each one? Stupid, stupid, stupid management decision.... How hard could it possibly be to pay an employee $8 an hour to simply click on a link in a report or email that is sent to them every hour, look at the site for 3 seconds and click a big fat button on their PC that, because that user has an administrative account, causes the site to be AUTHORITATIVELY AND INSTANTLY TAGGED AS AN ADULT SITE.

So far OpenDNS in my opinion is about a ~75-80% solution when it comes to blocking Adult sites. This is completely unacceptable.

written by timb_nz 311 days ago Rating: 2 | Rate Comment: + -

What are you using in addition to OpenDNS?

written by lleach4 184 days ago Rating: 1 | Rate Comment: + -

Totally agree. I would pay a premium to have subscribe to a higher level of service where sites are reviewed quickly. Right now I use integrity online for my filtering but I am in the process of leaving them because I can't customize the filter. With OpenDNS I can customize but only a limited number of sites. However, when I submit a site to integrity online it is reviewed within hours. I would gladly pay $50-100 per month to have sites reviewed by a single decision maker. Don't change the current service for everyone but allow business owners like me to pay for add-ons, so to speak.

written by nc4dx 20 days ago Rating: 0 | Rate Comment: + -

If you are going to block adult themes or pictures you should block all of it not just what is odvious. Like stuff as simple as string for instance. You can not look at string with out a thong being in the info somewhere. It is imoral and discusting.

written by URL Examiner 492 days ago Rating: 1 | Rate Comment: + -

A while back I submitted a suggestion (not approved for voting yet) to automatically approve pornography sites based on a keyword review when that site is submitted. That would automate the process significantly.

It would be nice when one submits a site, the whole URL is kept as "proof" that the site in question contained the content it is being flagged for. I realize that the DNS server can only check for the domain. But if OpenDNS kept the submitted URL, then the reviewers could see exactly what was being viewed.

written by pepe0001 407 days ago Rating: 0 | Rate Comment: + -

Just submit the site to OpenDNS as mentioned by Mark.

written by mackdavid 365 days ago - show/hide this comment Rating: -3 | Rate Comment: + -

written by norton.chad 167 days ago Rating: 0 | Rate Comment: + -

I just know that i summitted an adult site a month ago and it is still available through the filter because no one has voted on it yet. I know that other filtering companies have it blocked. I agree that they need to pay someone to get it done in a more timely matter.

written by pscs 163 days ago Rating: 1 | Rate Comment: + -

The problem is there are 400,000+ domains to be voted on.

I've just gone through a couple of hundred of them, and about 10% were not porn sites - eg linksexchange.net (it looks like someone has just done a search on a list of domains looking for something with a 'rude word' in).

85% were just parking pages. Now, I don't know if just the home page was a parking page with real adult pages at some 'hidden' URL within the domain, but I can't tell this from OpenDNS's system

5% were adult.

I'd think some ideas could be:

- allow people to pay for a premium service. You could perhaps 'earn' the premium service by voting on lots of pages.

- allow submitters to specify an exact URL which the voter could see to see if the site IS adult somewhere in its depths

- Parking pages should be easy for OpenDNS to detect automatically, since most go through the same few companies. If the 80% of sites are blocked for being parking pages, then they could be voted on at a lower priority than the others.

- submitters (the main one seems to be a moderator as well) shouldn't bulk submit anything with a slightly suspicious name, but actually check them first...

Also, the number of pages waiting for votes is just too much. Either the number of votes needed to decide a page needs to be reduced, or they need to cut down the number of pages being voted on.

If a page needs, say, 10 votes to be decided, and there are 5 million pages waiting to be voted on, that means that there could have been 45 million votes with no pages being decided. If they only put, say, 100,000 pages up for the vote at any one time, then there would be more completions for fewer votes.


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