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Help with URL.txt

Posted: Fri May 29, 2015 3:18 am
by johnnys
Hi, new here - thanks for the product it's very good!

Few questions about restricting URLs. I have some rules setup which seem to be working, however there are some limitations which I would like to get round if at all possible. We are using this browser in an educational environment in a prominent centralized location, and whilst we would like users to visit social media sites we want to restrict them to our sites and not their own personal ones - is this possible? We don't want to block social media altogether.

For example, we have blocked youtube access by adding the following

-youtube.com

However we have allowed our own youtube channel as follows;

+youtube.com/user/ourchannel

This works fine, however the limitation comes when a user clicks to play a video on our channel - the youtube url changes to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2o7nuLgVWEsdsdf etc

Ther same ting happend with instagram, we have disallowed instagram.com but allowed instagram.com/ourPage However whenever a user click to view an image the instagram url changes to instagram.com/p/2_P4-Fv6gh/?taken-by=ourPage

Perhaps I need to add some regex rules (I'm not very familiar with these). I have set up logs to track blocked sites and pages blocked, so this should help with creating new rules.

One other thing I noticed, we have blocked twiter (-twitter.com), but we have noticed that if a user visits a page with a twitter feed on it then they are blocked from visiting this page. I tried to add +syndication.twitter.com to the url file but it doesn't seem to be working, any suggestions?

Thanks in advance.
Johnny

Re: Help with URL.txt

Posted: Fri May 29, 2015 11:35 am
by Scott
The PWB filters work by checking the URL against the strings in the filter file.

If you block YouTube with "-youtube.com", and URL that contains "youtube.com" for example: "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2o7nuLgVWEsdsdf" which contains "youtube.com", it will be blocked.

For your YouTube channel you will need to allow each YouTube URL before you deny "youtube.com".

...
+watch?v=L2o7nuLgVWEsdsdf
+watch?v=XdVdQnKXZXU
+watch?v=PePl6Bbh8j0
-youtube.com

Here is more information about the PWB filters.
http://www.teamsoftwaresolutions.com/fo ... p?f=4&t=13

PWB checks all frames for URL matches, for embedded Twitter.com frames you will need to account for them in the filter, or use PWB v3 CEF and set the following in the INI file.

[Security]
CheckURLMainFrameOnly=True

http://www.teamsoftwaresolutions.com/fo ... f=5&t=3034

--Scott