Add a "day based" filtering feature.
Not planned
I would expect many parents could make use of the ability to block their children/dependents access to sites, based on the day of the week. So as a relevant example in our household, my teenager needs to get to bed around 10pm (ish) during the week so as to be in good shape for school.
On a Friday and Saturday night however he wants to stay up later and play on X-box live, and this is a reasonable request - all other things being equal. So - I want to set filters to block access to these on-line game sites:
> after 10pm Sunday-Thursday only (ie: not Friday and Saturday evenings)
> after 12pm Friday and Saturday only
This feature (day filters) was available on my old DLINK router - and I was disappointed to find moving to OPENDNS was a backward step in this regard.
Thanks Jim Coyle Wgtn NZ
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Yes, but this feature exists. No need to request it. It is a Netgear router with OpenDNS LPC enabled: http://www.opendns.com/support/article/125
Scheduling and user based profiles cannot be done online only, because an online service doesn't get the needed information. This must be supported locally by e.g. a router, as you have seen with your D-Link device before.
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What about the 100,000's of users that don't have/don't want/can't use that specific router?
Seems like it should be quite a simple to implement and very powerful feature. e.g. move from "Low" filter to "Custom" during work hours to block YouTube and FaceBook. (Try blocking these with normal router based domain name blocking! - if you can block either on all platforms please please post your method here)
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OK - so from my skill level of "knows enough to really screw things up" I wasn't taking into consideration the local DNS cache on each machine. Am I right in thinking that once a machine has accessed Facebook.com it no longer needs to check OpenDNS to resolve that address each time, so while it is technically possible - its also totally pointless!
Next I will go looking for common IP ranges and domains that I can add to my routers 'time of day' restrictions.
One step closer to "knows enough to tell other people how to screw things up"!
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"Am I right in thinking that once a machine has accessed Facebook.com it no longer needs to check OpenDNS to resolve that address each time, so while it is technically possible - its also totally pointless!"
Yep, you fully got it! There had to run local programs on each machine synchronously purging the caches (both, local resolver and browser) in parallel to the OpenDNS scheduling. With many efforts this could be done by e.g. the OpenDNS Updater too, but would be far over the head of most users. Most users would do it wrong and cried for support...
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As this has already been requested before I am closing this for comments. While you may add your vote to Domain blocking at certain times of day, at this time we believe the Netgear Live Parental Controls integration offers this functionality to end users.
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