Question - Site blocked by corporate firewalls

Stephen,

Yes. We are addressing this issue with Websense. Websense is the company that provides the filtering blacklist to many corporate IT departments. Due to the write ups and press attention that CollectiveX has received by popular blogs, we have been incorrectly classified as a social network. Consequently, we were grouped in with the likes of MySpace and Facebook as a public social network despite the fact that 80% of Groupsites powered by CollectiveX are closed private, professional communities. This is how we ended up on the Websense blacklist.

We have worked out a solution to this problem with the powers to be at Websense. It requires that we make a few modifications to our IP address routing so that we can make a distinction between the public social Groupsites and the private professional Groupsites that are powered by CollectiveX. This modification requires the integration of additional load balancing hardware on our part. We expect to have the solution fully implemented by the end of January.

Until then, have members that are being blocked alert their IT departments to remove CollectiveX from their filter.

Thanks, Clarence.  It's great to hear you all are working on this!  I've been drafting a response such as this to our members to help them get CX off their filters.  I've been telling them to add www.collectivex.com to the safe site list.  Are there other URLs I should include?

Any progress made on this issue?

I have a member who can't access the collectiveX website due to corporate filters

Thanks!

Diane

Hi Diane,

Thanks for bringing this up; it continues to be a problem for many of our corporate constituents, especially those in finance and/or insurance.

Any headway on this?

Thanks!
Stephen

Diane,

Can you find out from your member what filtering software their company is using.

Thanks,

Clarence

Clarence,

My member has no idea on what the filtering software is - the company is IKON Office Products - a fairly large (national) office machine dealer

Diane

I wanted to revive this again, because it is continuing to be a major issue for a great number of our corporate constituents, and may ultimate break our success with CollectiveX. 

In particular, financial institutions and tech companies that have some more stringent policies have the firewalls set up to block CollectiveX.  I have given the URLs as well as set up our groups as secure https, but hoping there is still more that can be done.

Thanks.

Guys... we are working on this issue.  It is difficult because we can't resolve the issue unless we know which software is blocking us  We'd previous identified that we were being blocked by Websesense (a company that provides filtering for many corporate firewalls) and we believe that we've resolved our issues with them.   

Clarence, how do your Custom Domain Mapping work as that may be a solution for Firewall access for both parties ?

Clarence,

My member (works for IKON Office Products) still can't access the site

Diane,

Would it be possible to have your member talk with someone from our tech team?  If so, please forward his/her information to me via private message.

Thanks,

Clarence

With the switch to Groupsite, I have been getting more messages that corporate firewalls are blocking the site again.  I received my latest report of this today, when a user at JP Morgan was unable to access one of our groups: https://oenacra.groupsite.com.

There are several major and minor black/blocklist providers out there such as:

• URLBlacklist.com


• DansGuardian.org (used by many Linux systems by default)


• Shallalist.de

As the filtering protection I use warns though:

"However, we have found that false positives make these blocklists insufficient on their own. Thus, we manually inspect all blocklists before updating our own content categories."

As Clarence is leading towards, there is no magic bullet here.  Each software filter may do things above and beyond what getting and remaining off of blacklists can do.

Thanks Zen.

I don't think these corporations are manually doing much, just blocking "social networking" sites categorically through these services.

The tricky part here that is bothersome is that CollectiveX was working for our corporate constituents, but the switch to groupsite killed this.  About 90% of our constituents are with major corporations.  If we can't give them access at work, then our groupsites are useless.

Guys,

We will get this issue resolved ASAP. We went through this at one point with CollectiveX. We just need to notify the powers that be at the firewall blocking software companies that know us a CollectiveX that we've changed our name to Groupsite.com. They already recognize that we are a social collaboration platform used by many professionals within companies and organizations.

Stay tuned. 

Clarence