"All Gaming Sites" logic blocking education sites

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Will L

• February 24, 2021 18:25

Hi, 

I have Blue+ and I am interested to know if there is any information that could be shared about what is used to have a site fall into default rules, specifically "All Gaming Sites" (metadata, tags, title, technology,etc).  The reason is my son comes to me when his school starts using new tools because he can't get to it.  I pause the "all gaming sites" rule and he is good to go.  I will then add an "always allow" rule for the domain and in most cases he will be fine once "all gaming sites" is back on, but not always but I know this is because of the distributive nature of some sites.

Would it be possible to get an "educational" group or be able to create a group with multiple sites rather than making exceptions for everything?  

example of sites that I  have exceptions for that are blocked by gaming:

rethinked.com, smartmusic.com, hrw.com

Any help or guidance would be greatly appreciated. 

I am ok with individual rules as that's how things have been for years but if that is the way it will be, any guidance on how a site gets flagged as gaming would be nice.

Thanks

William

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  Firewalla

  • February 25, 2021 01:53

  Just checked with our backend, all these sites are "education" sites, and are not labeled gaming.

  What happened in your case, is likely one or two sites mapping to the same IP address as a gaming site, which then is blocked.   

  One good way to check is when you visit rethinked[.]com for example, see if you get a gaming alarm, if not, then it is classified correctly.  Just the IP address was shared

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  Will L

  • February 25, 2021 20:49

  Thanks for the explanation. I figured it was probably something like that but I couldn't verify from what I can see.  Thanks again.

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  Firewalla

  • February 25, 2021 22:26

  A couple of our best engineers are looking at this now.   Hopefully they can come up with a better way to block

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  Bob Pasker

  • April 23, 2021 16:33

  I suggested in another thread to use target lists for Gaming, Video, etc.

  one example is that the Video block prevents acmes to Google Classroom 

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  Firewalla

  • April 23, 2021 16:40

  Have you tried to allow these sites? usually that will get you an exception. 

   

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  Will L

  • April 26, 2021 15:49

  I have added "Allow" rules but that is getting tedious since the schools are always adding more tools. 

  The allow rules seem to work but I can't say that with 100% certainty.

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