> It's so strange that these filtering products block all of RinkWorks instead of just the Dialectizer. While wintermute was here, he told us about how he tried to log in from a public library, and he couldn't get to RinkWorks on account of it being "pornographic."

The filtering mechanisms suck, that's why it gets blocked. If you wanted to fix it, you could try giving the Dialectizer its own domain name... I'll give you the $10 it costs to register a name if you wanna do that. I hate not being able to check the Forum from work. :P

> I still basically despise all filtering software. I might feel differently when I'm a parent, because it's just too easy to *accidentally* run across stuff, never mind find it on purpose, but for me right now there is nothing more annoying than being denied access to something legitimate, especially when a few bad sites still slip through. Getting blocked because RinkWorks is allegedly "pornographic" is like a slap in the face for all my conscientious efforts to make this a good site for families.

Yeah. I also hate the idea of filtering software at public institutions like libraries and schools. They seem far too much like a form of prior restraint on information, and don't even benefit from having librarians (or at least some authority within the institution) compile the list of things they censor. Worse still, the lists are often heavily-guarded *secrets,* as the various companies would just pilfer from each other if lists were public.

This means a library can be blocking sites that some corporation decided were inappropriate for reasons that will remain mysterious. There have been several cases of these companies blocking sites linked to their competitors or to sites critical. Back in '97, I think, one of the bigger censorware companies blocked the whole Time.com domain after Time published some bad things about it. Just the sort of things that should be blocked by libraries.

Stephen