Website categorisation

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-Rob-

Say Cheese!...Oh, and call me Susan
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I have a website at www.BlackBullPhotography.com for my wedding photography. It's hosted through SquareSpace and generally everything with it seems fine.

However, when I'm not shooting weddings I have the misfortune of working for a large organisation that has its IT run by CSC. I assume they have some kind of effective firewall in place and as a result a lot of the pages on my website come up as "Access Denied" due to them not being categorised.

Can anyone give me any advice as to how I might set the categorisation of my website so that CSC and other big corporations won't block any of my website pages?

Thanks in advance.
 
You don't.

Most corporate website filters have a database on them which is controlled by the vendor that supplies it (Sophos, Bloxx etc etc). As lots of new sites pop up daily this can lead to the smaller sites being uncategorised and as such default blocked by the appliance. The IT department of the corporation where the filter is applied will be able to override any categorisation if necessary.

You don't get to chose where your site ends up, otherwise malicious site makers would just mark their pages into a safe category (although allowed categories are often defined by each individual business, so even if you did get your site into a particular category there is no guarantee that the internet policy of every business will allow it).

edit - I think it may be possible to contact some vendors to request categorisation checking but as I say you're on a bit of a highway to nowhere as even then the category you end up in (at their discretion) may not be allowed at every business. Honestly it's not worth worrying about, if its a website that's critical to that business they'll identify the requirement and unblock the site manually.
 
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Some Webfilters will look at the page contents too. So if there isn't enough text to make a decision on it may return as uncategorised. Others will rely on URL databased, or a combination of both. I see that your site is using many domains in the backend for various elements. It could well be that its one of those that is breaking things for you too. You can use things like Developer Tools in the browser to look for the HTTP403 responses, showing which elements have been blocked. Of course these will most likely be logged as well... but it might be a start. You could then request access to those domains / URLs.
 
I know that Bloxx has a realtime scanning option, a few years ago we found it to be too much of a performance hit so turned it off. But even then, you're at the mercy of whether the category is actually allowed by the businesses own defined internet policy.

I know with the Sophos and Bloxx filters if the main domain is allowed but some of the content is on a restricted subdomain/alternative domain it will load the site but with broken images/css/js etc rather than a blanket "access denied" message.
 
I managed to find a resolution to my problem. Apparently CSC take their categorisation from a Bluecoat database so I submitted a category for my website on there and everything seems to be working fine now.
Obviously it only solves the problem of me accessing it at work. I guess I'll never know if other people have anything blocked by any firewalls.
 
I've got to ask Neil, how did you like your Bloxx filter? How long ago did you use it?

Rob, you can't control other corporation's access policies. In a global place there are things that different societies and businesses find offensive / appropriate.
 
As others have said, there is not a lot of information you can find out.

Most companies will block websites/pages which come up as 'Uncategorised'.

Most companies however would add it to some sort of white list if there was a genuine business need for accessing it.
 
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