unable to connect to forums; little information avail.

kaleedity

I'm kind of shooting in the dark here because I'm unable to provide much information. I'm able to access everything from home or from my phone, but work receives an error from any pa page. Work is not blocking anything pa related. This issue has only been the case since the last big temporary forum crash. I'm unable to provide ip or routing information for a couple of reasons.

Any ideas on what could have possibly changed in the crash?

Älphämönkëy

Nothing changed from an IP routing side. It was purely a backend reorganization.

Without more information, there isn't much I can do.

bowen

Is it a "can't connect" error or is it something else?

kaleedity

It's a can't connect error, similar to one you'd get with no internet connection. Other sites work, and sites that are blocked get a specific message.

It's going to be absurdly difficult to fix this with our security policy.

On the other hand, I got a proxy working so this issue no longer directly affects me. Though, if you have any bizarre reasons to want to test weird stuff on my end let me know as I can still duplicate the problem. If I'm the only one getting hit by this ignore it.

GPIA7R

I can't create threads in this forum, but I'd like to make PA aware that the "forums.penny-arcade.com" page is now being blocked by websense under the "Games" category. I imagine a lot of us have websense at work, so this will make a lot of users unable to visit.

The regular PA website and comic are not blocked. This I'd just another one of Websense's absurd categorizations... Does PA have any sway with companies like websense to get them recategorized?

I know this came up a couple years ago... The main site was filtered as "adult content", because of the dickerdoodles.

Älphämönkëy

GPIA7R wrote: »

I can't create threads in this forum, but I'd like to make PA aware that the "forums.penny-arcade.com" page is now being blocked by websense under the "Games" category. I imagine a lot of us have websense at work, so this will make a lot of users unable to visit.

The regular PA website and comic are not blocked. This I'd just another one of Websense's absurd categorizations... Does PA have any sway with companies like websense to get them recategorized?

I know this came up a couple years ago... The main site was filtered as "adult content", because of the dickerdoodles.

That would probably explain why it is blocked. I have absolutely no pull at any of those companies. The last time we got categorized incorrectly, it was easier to create a new subdomain.

I'm almost positive the reason the main site is not blocked is because some benevolent fan somewhere stubbornly refuses to categorize it as "gaming"

Dunadan019

the main site is categorized under entertainment (which is also blocked for me but that's not such a big deal)

is this going to be fixed somehow? or should I start trying to think up a reason to justify to my job how the forums are critical to my job and should be added to their exception list?

edit: also, I was able to access the forums yesterday but not today so that's when I saw the change.

GPIA7R

Yeah it just happened today. Entertainment is open for us, and I talked to the network admin about it. We checked our websense console and saw it was changed to "gaming". Occasionally PA hosts images with other subdomains (smugmug) and they show as "personal network storage and backup". Meh

But yeah... "gaming" is a terrible category. The people that assign them are lazy... Because, although Wikipedia isn't blocked, some PAGES of it are based on the name having something to do with games -_-