My School Blocked Laura's Playground :(

[Guest Keane]

I was able to go on last year.... maybe i even signed on during this school year. I just checked recently and both the site and this forum have been blocked due to "Adult/Sexually Explicit Content." I mean, Oh my goodness, really??!

[Guest]

We go to great pains to keep adult material off the site. Even pictures have to be fully clothed. Unless we missed something. if so someone should point it out to us. This site is a suicide prevention site for teens and adults. Not sure who would want to block us.

Laura

[Guest Keane]

Maybe someone has something against transpeople. *sigh*

[Guest angie]

I was able to go on last year.... maybe i even signed on during this school year. I just checked recently and both the site and this forum have been blocked due to "Adult/Sexually Explicit Content." I mean, Oh my goodness, really??!

Laura's Playground???????

Not even close.Their IT department apparently only looked at the site title,considered it an adult

oriented site. And not the content of the site, could would have been very helpful for those of your schoolmates still searching for themselves.

Angie

[Sally]

The problem comes from our name and it has long been my complaint about the term transsexual from the beginning - it makes narrow minded shallow brained idiots (basically everyone in charge of anything) jump to the wrong conclusions.

To the morality policing robots that keep our minds safe from any new ideas the word sex contained anywhere on a site makes it a pornographic site and must be banned.

If Gender Gifted were the accepted term and that would be where people looked for information then the morality bots scouring the web would pass right by but it is not so they find those offensive three letters and we get blocked - so sorry if this causes a massive and senseless loss of life but we must be protected from anything different and ourselves as well so too bad if you are suicidal and looking for help - at least you will die moral, unless you happen to (like myself) consider suicide to be a truly immoral act, it is killing and that is always forbidden.

Sorry for the rant but it is a subject that angers me like no other.

Love ya,

Sally (a morally responsible transsexual)

[Guest Keane]

Just realized that I've been censored for an acronym D: oopsssss.

Yeah, no offense but "Laura's Playground" does sound like a "naughty"website. Once you poke around though, its super innocent >:[ this upsets me.

[Guest Keane]

Good point, Sally :/ i think there's a way to contact the people who do they blocking online and they can change it. I'll try that out.

[Guest Natalie92]

It's blocked at my school too, but for a different reason. If you type it in the school district's filter pops up: "This site has been blocked. Cateogry: Social Networking / Forums"

My guess is that your school district put a very strict filter on the word "sexual" and that may have something to do with the site being blocked.

[Guest Keane]

They can block sites in libraries?? Even in the adult section? Wow.

[Carolyn Marie]

They can block sites in libraries?? Even in the adult section? Wow.

Yes, they do that where I live also. The computers in the library are available to anyone, so they have to

restrict use. I haven't tried to access Laura's Playground on them, but I wouldn't be shocked if it was blocked.

Carolyn Marie

[Guest Edu]

Maybe that's not the case here, but from what I have seen, most of these filters are heavily automated and keyword-based.

As an anecdote, I have sometimes had trouble to reach sites about the LaTeX text formatting system just because of silly filters associating that name with one obvious usage of the material known as "latex"... even if the word is confused, there are many usages of that material that are entirely unrelated ¬¬'

The page titles within this forum use the "S-E-X" letter sequence twice, and that sequence is also used multiple times within the pages' contents/code (headings and navigation appear everywhere). This is quite enough for a silly automated filter to do the silly thing and block the site.

There is a workaround, however, that may allow reading (but not posting, sorry) the forums through some of these filters: caches. I have just tried Google's cache and, while it seems to include a good deal of content, navigation can be quite a pain. The Web Archive has better navigation (clicking links tries to bring you to the "archived" version instead of the live one, so it's more likely to bypass the filter), but worse content. You may try other caches, such as those of other search engines, but I'm not familiar with them. In any case, these methods won't let you view the most recent posts; and they are a hassle. Also, there is no guarantee they will work: some filters directly block caches, or just chose whether to block a page or not based on the content that's coming over the wire. But if you need to find some info or some old post, and can't wait until you are on a more tolerant network (for example, at home), this might help.

Regards,

Ethain

[Guest Keane]

Yes, they do that where I live also. The computers in the library are available to anyone, so they have to

restrict use. I haven't tried to access Laura's Playground on them, but I wouldn't be shocked if it was blocked.

Carolyn Marie

The computers are available to anyone here with a library card too, but you either go to the Youth section or the Adult section if you're 14 or older. and the adult computers have these protectors on the screens so you can only see the screen if you're directly in front of it.

[Guest N. Jane]

That happened in my workplace a few years ago, transsexual support forms were blocked apparently by the word transsexual triggering the automated content filter. An anonymous note to the union about "discrimination" and the block disappeared

[Guest Natalie92]

The computers are available to anyone here with a library card too, but you either go to the Youth section or the Adult section if you're 14 or older. and the adult computers have these protectors on the screens so you can only see the screen if you're directly in front of it.

14 is still WAY too young to be looking at explicit content though, so they would need to have at least some filter system. And most IT people, when creating filters usually block out most sites that pop a the following 3 letter code: S - e - X which happens to be littered all over this forum due to it being in the middle of a term used a lot on here: transSEXual. Some filters are so tight that it would block out this site as being explicit just for that.

Natalie

[Guest karen_h]

God bless Jerry and Dr. Phil and Exodus for enlightening the world about us. I know that The Great Pumpkin will be bringing them a rather large bag of rocks. Wonder if I can get FAA clearence to deliver them from 20k feet

[Guest Emily H]

Of course they did . Mine might block it just for being a message board.

You know I emailed my school counselor about my concern with the tolerance levels in our school for people like us, and i haven't gotten a response at all. Its been at least two months.

~Andrea

[Guest angie]

When still finding myself so many years ago now,

I would search the net using my computer at work.

The only one available to me at that time,and as the

IT department caught on,one by one they were blocked.

All were PG rated,only for information,searching for how

to get where I knew I had to be.

Gender Gifted has a nice sound.But how many would understand?

Transsexual leaves no doubt about who we are and where we are going.

I and many of my friends,embrace the word as our own.I am a TS woman.

Angelique

[Guest Tammy Maher]

I was able to go on last year.... maybe i even signed on during this school year. I just checked recently and both the site and this forum have been blocked due to "Adult/Sexually Explicit Content." I mean, Oh my goodness, really??!

Wow that is nice considering my old high school called us pornography.

This is why college is awesome, no blocks, but you do get in trouble for illegal stuff.

When did you get back though?

[Guest Natalie92]

Wow that is nice considering my old high school called us pornography.

This is why college is awesome, no blocks, but you do get in trouble for illegal stuff.

When did you get back though?

Actually, "Adult/Sexually Explicit Content" IS pornography. They just don't like to use that word when the block message pops up.

Natalie Alexis

[Guest Tammy Maher]

Actually, "Adult/Sexually Explicit Content" IS pornography. They just don't like to use that word when the block message pops up.

Natalie Alexis

But it doesn't say it this explicitly.

[Guest ~Brenda~]

Hmmmm,

I think that with certain institutions the filter for blocked sites simply look for key words such as "sex". So if a site has a phrase like this is a NOT CYBERSEX site, the primitive filters pick up on the word CYBERSEX and automatically block it. The filter's are not sophisticated enough to understand context. So that they will miss the NOT in front of the CYBERSEX word. I doubt that the phrase "Laura's Playground" has anything to do with the blocking. The filters, I am sure are programmed to scan for "transsexual" to automatically block any site that has any reference to terms like that without any regard for the true content of a site like Laura's. Blocking filters are crude and are based on keywords not content. Many legitimate sites get blocked for this reason.

Brenda

[Guest Zabrak]

Hmmmm,

I think that with certain institutions the filter for blocked sites simply look for key words such as "sex". So if a site has a phrase like this is a NOT CYBERSEX site, the primitive filters pick up on the word CYBERSEX and automatically block it. The filter's are not sophisticated enough to understand context. So that they will miss the NOT in front of the CYBERSEX word. I doubt that the phrase "Laura's Playground" has anything to do with the blocking. The filters, I am sure are programmed to scan for "transsexual" to automatically block any site that has any reference to terms like that without any regard for the true content of a site like Laura's. Blocking filters are crude and are based on keywords not content. Many legitimate sites get blocked for this reason.

Brenda

Yeah I was going to post earlier and explain that the bots that do the checking/blocking of websites arn't smart enough to pick up all the content. It'll just see something like "No porn" and pick up the porn part then block it. I'm going to guess this is the reason Laura's got blocked.

[Guest Anthelia]

This is why college is awesome, no blocks, but you do get in trouble for illegal stuff.

I wish my college didn't block sites, I had Lauras blocked last quarter for porn/adult content. For some reason its unblocked this quarter. However, there are some fairly simple ways to bypass schools blocking systems. Not that I ever did anything like that in High School or anything... *innocent whistle*

[Guest Natalie92]

Hmmmm,

I think that with certain institutions the filter for blocked sites simply look for key words such as "sex". So if a site has a phrase like this is a NOT CYBERSEX site, the primitive filters pick up on the word CYBERSEX and automatically block it. The filter's are not sophisticated enough to understand context. So that they will miss the NOT in front of the CYBERSEX word. I doubt that the phrase "Laura's Playground" has anything to do with the blocking. The filters, I am sure are programmed to scan for "transsexual" to automatically block any site that has any reference to terms like that without any regard for the true content of a site like Laura's. Blocking filters are crude and are based on keywords not content. Many legitimate sites get blocked for this reason.

Brenda

THANK YOU Brenda! I've been trying to say the exact thing, but you said it better. What shocks me is that this site wouldn't be blocked on a High School network simply for the fact that it's a forum. I know that most School Districts have very strict filters blocking access to forums. (although you can override them by caching the site. Not that I'd be willing to expose my secret to anyone who happened to look at my computer, or the people in the county offices who manage the network)

Natalie Alexis

[Guest Keane]

Wow that is nice considering my old high school called us pornography.

This is why college is awesome, no blocks, but you do get in trouble for illegal stuff.

When did you get back though?

Get back from where?