> I just thought I'd let you all know how much I hate internet filters. Especially ones that block sites based on what they are without reviewing their content or soley because of a certain word it contains, regardless of the context- like anything with the word "chat" in it. I can't get into Rinkchat from my house because of the ridiculous filter my mother put on the computer. And what's worse, she didn't even know what she was doing or what the filter would block when she signed up for it.
>
> Anyway, I won't be around Rinkchat for the next three weeks. Grr.
>
> ~Mina "having an awful Christmas break already" moon

Ouch. This reminds me of a few content-filtering fiascos I've experienced at school...

There was one computer that, for some reason, would not let me enter "Thoreau" into a search form, during a Language Arts research project. (Coincidentally, whatever substring of "Thoreau" the computer thought was censor-worthy--I'm still not sure exactly what it might be--was blocked as an "IRC keyword". Apparently entering certain words as part of an HTML form will prevent a site from loading on a certain filtering program. The purpose of this feature, I'm still not quite clear on; perhaps it's a misnomer, or perhaps there's more to it than I've seen. After all, there's zillions of ways to enter IRC chats, most of them *not* through web-based forms...)

The same computer also wouldn't let me search for "Huckleberry Finn", giving the same message mentioned above. Yet when I navigated manually to a site containing the novel, it came through in its entirety. Hmm...

Then there was the computer that blocked the "Good Clean Fun" joke site that's been linked several times from the Forum. The name pretty much sums the site up; so what were they [the filter writers] thinking?

-- codeman"hopefully I won't end up causing them to block the rinkforum"38