How do I prevent a website being misclassified by Websense?

Posted by Jeff Atwood on Pro Webmasters See other posts from Pro Webmasters or by Jeff Atwood
Published on 2010-10-13T21:45:33Z Indexed on 2013/08/02 16:06 UTC
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I received the following email from a user of one of our websites:

This morning I tried to log into example.com and I was blocked by Websense at work because it is considered a "social networking" site or something. I assume the websense filter is maintained by a central location, so I'm hoping that by letting you guys know you can get it unblocked.

per Wikipedia, Websense is web filtering or Internet content-control software.

This means one (or more) of our sites is being miscategorized by Websense as "social networking" and thus disallowed for access at any workplace that uses Websense to control what websites their users can and cannot access during work hours.

(I know, they are monsters!)

  1. How do we dispute this Websense classification error, as our websites should generally be considered "information technology" and never "social networking"?

  2. How do we know what category Websense has put our sites in, so we can pro-actively make sure they're not wrong?

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