How do I find out why a particular site was blocked?

The CIPA guidelines require schools to block students’ access to “inappropriate matter on the internet,” which includes obscene and pornographic content. Securly Filter helps to ensure that all such content is blocked.

To ensure that kids are protected from all forms of inappropriate and malicious content on the internet, we have segmented our database into a range of categories, including Pornography, Drugs, Gambling, Social Media, Hate, Games, Social Networking, etc. (These categories are listed under ‘Blocked Categories’ in your ‘Policy Editor’.)

Any new website that does not exist in the database is marked as "Uncategorized" and blocked if the admin has configured it to be blocked. Our PageScan tool automatically scans it when a user visits it for the first time and is categorized appropriately. This is available for both Securly extension and SmartPac users.

You can find out why a particular site was blocked by looking at the user activity in Securly Filter. To do this:

1. Log in to Securly Filter and navigate to the Activities page.
2. Click the 'info' icon for a blocked event to view details of what category the site belongs to and the policy it was blocked under. 

You can also determine why a site was blocked by looking at the blocked page on the user’s machine.

Note you can decide which categories will be blocked for specific OUs per your school’s policies. However, we recommend blocking pornography, drugs, gambling, network misuse, other adult content, and hate categories for appropriate protection.