Choose whether or not to have subdomains inherit tags

Follow

greenham

August 01, 2015 22:54

I had "search engines" blocked for a little while, with Google.com and safe.duckduckgo.com whitelisted. Google is only whitelisted because so many websites rely on scripts from Google, and those scripts are often hosted on subdomains that don't have any tags, which means they inherit the "search engines" tag from Google.com. I ran into a similar issue, with q.bing.com being blocked and screwing up my browsing of stackexchange.com.

I realize one way to fix this would be to tag the subdomains that have been wrongly blocked, but it happens very frequently and takes a while to figure out what was blocked, not to mention that since it is blocked I don't know what kind of site it is exactly.

I propose instead that for each category we block (and each blacklisted site) users be allowed to select whether or not subdomains should inherit the tags for the blocked domains.

In my case, that would allow me to block "search engines" without search engines' obscure but important subdomains being blocked.

0

• 

  rotblitz August 02, 2015 19:22

  "I don't know what kind of site it is exactly."

  If you install and run a program like http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/dns_query_sniffer.html you can see in real-time what domains are being queried while surfing. With this knowledge you can then easily and granularily blacklist and whitelist domain names as needed.

  "I had "search engines" blocked for a little while, with Google.com and safe.duckduckgo.com whitelisted."

  Not entirely sure what you want to achieve, but if you just want to block all search engines but DuckDuckGo, you better do not block the search engines category, but you add the www subdomains of the most famous search engines to your "always block" list, like www.google.com, www.bing.com, www.yahoo.com.

  0

  Comment actions Permalink
• 

  greenham August 03, 2015 13:46

  That's absurd. There are thousands of search engines out there. Allowing people to block all search engines (with or without exceptions) is exactly what the "search engine" category is for.

  0

  Comment actions Permalink
• 

  rotblitz August 03, 2015 14:48

  "That's absurd. There are thousands of search engines out there."

  I see now where you stand.  No matter, the same applies:

  Block the Search Engines category, and whitelist those domains and subdomains you need access to.  You now know how to find them out.

  And let's see what OpenDNS say about your idea to optionally disable inheritance of tags to subdomains not being categorized.

  0

  Comment actions Permalink

Please sign in to leave a comment.