Customizing protection & blocked sites

 

First go to webprotectme.com/admin/protection (you may need to login).

 

You'll see an overview of your household protection settings:

 

 

 

These settings apply to every user in your household, except for users you have applied customized protection to in the People area.

 

Your household protection settings are divided into 4 sections:

• Safe Search protects video site and search engine results (like Youtube and Google)
• URL Whitelist contains addresses that should always be allowed
• URL Blacklist contains addresses that should always be blocked
• Blocked Categories are types of websites that should be blocked

 

Safe Search

WebProtectMe Safe Search supports:

Search Terms & Results: Google, YouTube, Twitter, Yahoo, Bing, Vimeo, Wikipedia, Tumblr, Walmart and Target.

Search Terms only: Facebook and Amazon.

When Safe Search is enabled, supported video sites and search engines will block searches containing blocked search terms.

Sites listed under Blocked Search Terms & Results will also exclude offensive results for terms that are allowed. This level of blocking requires cooperation from the site with WebProtectMe. If you would like to ensure blocking illicit search results for allowed terms, we recommend adding facebook.com to your Blacklist.

For example, if you search for "porn" on Youtube or Google with Safe Search, you won't get any offensive results listed. This protects your family from video sites and search engines that you want to allow but may have a mix of clean and offensive content.

 

To enable or disable Safe Search simply check or uncheck the Safe Search box:

 

URL Whitelist

Sometimes you want to block a category like "Classifieds & Auctions"  but you'd still like to allow ebay.com.

To do that you'd add "ebay.com" as a whitelist entry by first clicking on the + button:

 

A new empty entry box will appear below your last whitelist entry. Enter ebay.com into the new entry box:

 

That's it! Your new entry will automatically be saved, and any address containing the domain ebay.com will now be allowed regardless of its category.

Besides a simple domain we also support other whitelist entry types:

Simple Wildcard

Place a * anywhere you want a wildcard match.

For example:

- *ebay.com would match motors.ebay.com, shopping.ebay.com, anytextebay.com, etc.

- http://*ebay.com/* would match any non-secure ebay.com address, but would not match secure ones like https://www.ebay.com/motors (note the https).

 

Regular Expressions

Regular expressions are a powerful pattern matching format that allow you to make complex whitelist entries.

For example ^http://(www)+(\.*) would match any address starting with http://www.

So http://www.example.com would match but http://example.com wouldn't.

A good tutorial on regular expressions: regular-expressions.info

 

URL Blacklist

Blacklist entries have the same formats as whitelist entries but block the matching sites rather than allowing them.

For example, say you wanted to allow the "Investing/Financial Services" category but block stocktips.com. By adding *stocktips.com as a blacklist entry, that site would now be blocked.

 

Blocked Categories

Categories are the heart of WebProtectMe protection. They are a list of 50+ types of websites (e.g. Nudity, Gambling, et.) you can block access to.

 

The categories are organized into convenient groups:

 

The number next to the group name, tells you how many categories it contains (in this case 4).

You can block the entire group by checking the box next to the group:

Checking the box also expands the group so you can see all of the categories it contains. You can turn off the individual categories under the group by clearing the checkbox next to the category.

For example, if your job requires you to investigate fraud sites, you would simply uncheck "Fraud/Illegal Activities" and sites of that type would be allowed while every other type of site under "Illegal/Cheating" would still be blocked.