Thread: Web Filtering Software

nothing beats supervision

obvious stated... nothing out there offers anything approaching a clean feed without a bucket load of collateral damage happening.

some isps offer clean feeds, and some of the software has various levels of success.

you can trial stuff like net nanny and see what best suits your needs.

others include

Cyber Patrol Parental Controls, Web Filtering, Online Safety | CyberPatrol
Cyber Sitter CYBERsitter 11 Official Website

A program like netnanny lets you set up individual profiles for each user. It also has access to a webdatabase that automatically classifies websites. This DB is kept reasonably up to date. It has standard profiles and you can also set timezones for web access (ie 7pm to 10pm Tues to Thurs). Using the history logs you can also explicitly allow or deny certain sites. I used this for my kids in XP I assume that there is a Win7 version out there and a range of products from other suppliers.

Originally Posted by incisor

nothing beats supervision

obvious stated... nothing out there offers anything approaching a clean feed without a bucket load of collateral damage happening.

some isps offer clean feeds, and some of the software has various levels of success.

you can trial stuff like net nanny and see what best suits your needs.

others include

Cyber Patrol Parental Controls, Web Filtering, Online Safety | CyberPatrol
Cyber Sitter CYBERsitter 11 Official Website

Absolutely correct! Inc.
Our desktop is downstairs with all its bells and whistles as a gaming machine.
We have a reasonably quick laptop upstairs for other stuff.
I am about to purchase another flat screen monitor, and wall mount it above the laptop and the boy can use the internet upstairs in full view.
Just after some web filtering as a broad first cut restrictor.

Cheers

Also regularly check the history for anything that has been accessed you want blocked and block it (and anything you already know you don't wan't access to) manually in the router.

I have not used it, but from a quick read of the manual, the router I installed recently has a built in configurable filter (And allows one computer to be unfiltered). This is probably common on recent routers.

But as Incisor says - nothing will produce a clean feed, and anything approaching it will create a lot of collateral damage.

(And I rather suspect that anyone who thinks they can stop a teenager from accessing pornography is kidding themselves - at best you can make it hard for them! Maybe best to discuss it with them, rather than trying to block it. Simply letting them know that you know (see clubagreenie post) what they are looking at may well have a major effect.)

Do NOT let them know the router password!

John

What router do you have. (brand and type) You may well be able block sites to a specific computer in your home.

You could limit the downstairs computer to only the gaming servers. Pretty drastic, but limiting to a specific small number of IP addresses is more likely doable than trying to restrict a certain type of site.

A friend also had a router that gave control of what times of day certain computers on the network could access the internet.

I'm pretty sure you can block sites by url on some routers. I just looked at my netgear, you can block by keyword or domain name, schedule times for access to blocked sites or always or never or allow certain ip's to have access. Also block services (web access) to certain ip's on your network. There's also email notification of attempted access available so you can know if he's trying anything.