snowdeal.org > ex machina: hey, sonicwall, fix your faulty filtering algorithm!

ex machina

hey, sonicwall, fix your faulty filtering algorithm!

i've been contacted occasionally over the years from faithful readers complaining that they couldn't reach the site because of draconian content blocking software that has erroneously categorized the vast wasteland as pornographic because of a large number of images with skin tones, but i've never experienced it first-hand and i now can fully appreciate just how irritating it can be.

i can't seem to find a way to contact the presumably fine folks who maintain the sonicwall content filtering database to fix the error so i can check my email while on break at places that use the filter.

any hints would be greatly appreciated.

bookmark: del.icio.us ::digg it ::furl ::reddit ::yahoo ::

6/19/2006 10:46:00 PM 2 comments

2 Comments:

I'm an engineer at Sonicwall.

Sonicwall has a wide array of sources for rating web sites: third-party vendors, web directories, web crawling, humans, and auto-rating. But the internet is growing and changing rapidly, so it can happen that a rating is outdated or wrong. We are constantly working on improving the quality of our ratings.

In your case, I don't see any porn on your blog, so I have changed the rating to "web communications" (a rating we use for forums and blogs). The new rating should take effect after about a day.

In general, to point out a rating error and request a change, users can go to http://cfssupport.sonicwall.com, enter the site in the box for a rating review, and then click on the Rating Request link to open a form for entering the suggested correction.

Hope this helps,

Thomas Raffill

By Anonymous, at 3:26 PM

hi thomas,

thanks for politely responding to my little rant and fixing the issue. i made it to the csm product page, but it wasn't apparent at all how to sumbit an url for re-rating from that page and just gave up after clicking through a few of the tabs.

i appreciate you changing the rating and pointing out how to make changes in the future.

i think it was a competitive service ( i can't seem to find the blog post that discussed snowdeal.org being blocked ) that was blocking based on skin tones ( i take a lot of pictures of my son which are very decidedly not pornographic ) and i just assumed your system was blocking based on similar assumptions. i can't think of any other reason why snowdeal.org would have been ranked as a porn site. i've always owned the site and it's never had one iota of porn :-)

By e3, at 9:11 PM

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