Don’t want your kids taking a gander at gambling sites or exposed to pornography? We don’t blame you. Intego ContentBarrier can block out entire categories of Internet sites so your children aren’t exposed to objectionable content. You can also set up a specific list of approved websites so your kids can access them without accidentally running into a filter. If you’ve already installed ContentBarrier, you are ready to begin blocking or allowing specific web sites right now. Here’s how to set up it up.
ContentBarrier gives you three options to prevent the selected users from accessing certain websites. They are: Allow access to all websites, Block selected categories of websites, and Only allow selected websites. Each has its own screen of configuration options that resembles the screens you saw during the setup process, except with more options.
The Allow access to all websites option is the simplest, as there are no settings: if you select this radio button, the selected user can view any web site.
The Block selected categories of websites choice is ContentBarrier’s default. It provides the most options, which are divided into four sections: Filtered Categories, Trusted Websites, Blocked Websites, and Custom Keywords.
When you look under the Filtered Categories section, you see a list of website categories with the Alcohol, Gambling, Hacking, Racism, Sex/Pornography, and Violence categories turned on – that is, blocked from this user. To prevent this user from browsing websites in other categories, click Add Category…, select the category, and click the Add button. (Filtering is done by analyzing keywords in web pages, as well as by a list of websites maintained by Intego and updated regularly via NetUpdate.)
Next, you can choose to allow your user to access certain websites, regardless of whether they fall into a forbidden category, by clicking on the Trusted Websites tab. To add a web site to this list, click Add trusted website, which puts “www.example.com” into the list. This is just a placeholder: to change it to the site of our choice, double-click that link and type the site for which you want to allow access.
Note that all subdomains will be allowed; allowing google.com also allows www.google.com, maps.google.com, and news.google.com. However, the opposite is not true: for example, if you only allow www.duckduckgo.com, the user will be unable to reach duckduckgo.com (without the www).
To remove a site from the list, click it and either press the Delete key or click the minus sign at the bottom left of the list.
You set up Blocked Websites and Keywords in exactly the same way as you set up Categories. They function as they names suggest:
Users can never reach a site that you’ve listed on their Blocked Websites, even if it doesn’t fall into any forbidden categories. If you’ve created any entries in a user’s Custom Keywords list, that user can’t reach any site on which that word appears. In the event of a conflict – if you’ve listed the same web site listed in both the Trusted Websites and Blocked Websites lists, for example – ContentBarrier will block the site.
Last in the Block selected categories of websites section at the bottom of the window. It has two settings:
Enable SafeSearch, which prevents the user from seeing questionable sites in the search results of several popular search engines, such as Google, Bing and Yahoo, which offer a SafeSearch feature.
Block encrypted websites prevents the user from reaching any site that uses the HTTPS protocol, as is common in sites where money or confidential information changes hands. Checking this box will effectively stop nearly all online shopping, although it will also block other sites.
Regardless of how you decide to block (and allow) access to sites, the popup menu at the bottom of this window gives you a choice of what happens when your user attempts to reach a blocked site.
By default, users will be sent to a web page that tells them why ContentBarrier has blocked their access.
To give this user access to the page – if it was incorrectly blocked, for example – click the ALLOW THIS WEBSITE… button at the bottom of the page. A dialog box comes up with options to give access to the entire domain (example.com in this case), just the specific web page the user attempted to access, or any external resources associated with the page.
Clicking either Preview or Unlock requires you to enter an administrator's password, preventing ordinary users from unlocking sites without permission. (The only thing a non-administrative user can do from here is click Cancel, leaving the site blocked.)
If you click Preview, a window appears that displays the requested page so you can check to see if it's safe; you'll see the choices given above. Unlock provides access to the page, site, or pages containing the specified text, depending on which of these you have checked.
If you feel a web site was blocked unjustly, you can click Submit this link, which will send a report to Intego. We will examine the page to see if it should not be blocked.
Need Help Using ContentBarrier?
If you still have questions about using our ContentBarrier software, please check our ContentBarrier Knowledge Base for answers to the most common questions by clicking the link below:
You can also contact our Support Team directly for assistance by completing a support ticket online here:
Our Mac experts are here to help!
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