Lowe's blocks bladeforums

jill jackson

jill jackson

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Sitting in the parking lot of Lowe's, hooked up to their free WiFi and low and behold, site is filtered out! All the dangerous tools and knives I could walk out of that store with and they block a knife forum?
 
I wonder who sets these filters, or if they buy a pre-set plan.

Lowe’s is not alone. (There is another thread about this at a different business.) If you go to mass general hospital you will not get on this site. If you go to another hospital, no problem.
 
Probably automatic filter settings. What I can get on where is always very odd. Bladeforums is fine at the hospital, but a pretty mild humor site (cursing, no nudity or anything terribly adult) is blocked. I strongly suspect the only sites a big employer like Lowe's would go out of their way to add would be one they saw a lot of employees wasting time on.
 
Insipid Moniker said:
Probably automatic filter settings. What I can get on where is always very odd. Bladeforums is fine at the hospital, but a pretty mild humor site (cursing, no nudity or anything terribly adult) is blocked. I strongly suspect the only sites a big employer like Lowe's would go out of their way to add would be one they saw a lot of employees wasting time on.
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The local library has bladeforums blocked too. Also any firearms related sites, even though there's Guns & Ammo mag on the rack!
 
It's pretty likely that these are automatic filters. The filters could be targeting the 'forum' aspect of this site, or the 'knife' part. Filters generally block anything associated with so-called weapons. I doubt that bladeforums in particular was manually, deliberately blacklisted.
 
Lance Leon said:
It's pretty likely that these are automatic filters. The filters could be targeting the 'forum' aspect of this site, or the 'knife' part. Filters generally block anything associated with so-called weapons. I doubt that bladeforums in particular was manually, deliberately blacklisted.
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^^^ Typically, these filters work on keywords than sites and the "weapons" list my include blade/knife/... as keywords. You can easily test this out by trying to head over to knifecenter, or some other similarly named site. Its a general category block, than a specific site (most likely scenario).
 
www.bladeforums.com is actually categorized as "weapons" by one of the largest content filter/proxy companies, and this probably will never change.

Many content filters block the "weapons" category by default.

You can get around such restrictions via proxy or a VPN.
 
I think it could be related to NSFW content in Whine & Cheese and outright nudity in Pirate's Cove. While not available to the public, that information should still be archived on the site and blocked by filters.
 
Even if you use a VPN? I'll have to try it, with my VPN, sometime. All they should see is encrypted traffic, and you hooked to some other server, in what ever country you decide to connect to.
 
VPN will get around any local filtering. They use purchased lists, probably a Meraki or something. So anywhere they use these lists will be blocked.
 
dkb45 said:
I think it could be related to NSFW content in Whine & Cheese and outright nudity in Pirate's Cove. While not available to the public, that information should still be archived on the site and blocked by filters.
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Speaking of the pirate's cove, where would one find this? I heard it was only available for paying members, but I was under the impression that gold was sufficient membership level to gain access.
 
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