TexasCHLforum.com

While surfing the guest internet in the Providence-St. Patrick Hospital in Missoula, MT this morning I found the "Gateway to Airguns" and "Rimfire Central" forums to be blocked due to gun content. OTOH, the "Texas CHL Forum" was open to one and all."

Way to go, CHAS!

I have found that these blocks are usually the result of a subscription service provided by a third party to the institution. They just select a package deal from the service that includes subject matter thay want to block in general, without knowledge of the specific sites that are blocked.

One day my institution started blocking this forum. I complained to my IT rep, and he found that a lot of servers had been upgraded over the weekend and the wrong subscription service had been installed, and they corrected their error.

All the blocking apps are stupid....though they might work somewhat for adult sites. Trying to block "gun" content is ridiculous. They going to block youtube with all the thousands of videos about guns and shooting? There are hundreds if not thousands of gun blogs, both inside and outside the US. There is no way to block more than a tiny percentage of them.

I have to travel to a location for work that has one of these blockers. They block the official Texas lotto site for "gambling." But they don't block any of the many newspaper sites that publish the exact same information on lottery numbers. They also block a couple other sites I visit for inane reasons....but for every one they block there are at least 10 with similar content. I think some of them must block just off the site url....so if it contains "gun" or "weapon" in the address it gets blocked. Same site with an innocuous title wouldn't. Texaschlforum probably doesn't even register with most blockers.

Silliness indeed!

In this OP instance, two sought sites dealing solely with BB/Pellet guns and .22 LR were blocked whilst the site dealing with shooting folk with 'eargesplitten-loudenboomers' was left wide open for all to peruse.

While I've previously mentioned on here the benefits of using Witopia VPN or any other paid service as a proxy server, there is a free workaround that is available to anyone:

Use Google Translate as a proxy server. To do this, simply set the input block as any other language (e.g. Japanese), and then set the translation block as English. Then, type in the website name into the input block (http://www.rimfirecentral.com/forums/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;), and it will show up as a hyperlink in the 'English' block.

Click that hyperlink and it will take you to the site, but instead of being the actual site, it's a 'translated to English' version of the site that shows up in the Google Translate application. Of course, since the site is already in English, the translation is just about foolproof .

This way, you've not actually visited the site. Rather, Google's servers have visited it, and are then sending you (via their own domain) a perfectly translated version of the site. This helps bypass many (if not all) of the filtering tools employed.

Of course, Witopia or any other personal VPN sites would work better, but this is a good, inexpensive (free) workaround for the occasional user who may find themselves behind a wall of sorts for a short duration.