Saying "No" to MySpace.com — Once and For All
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Contributed by Jonathan Foth, Network Systems Engineer, Bakersfield City School District
With 31 elementary and 8 middle schools, Bakersfield City School District (BCSD) has blocked access to MySpace.com — both to conserve resources and maintain a focus on education and business needs.
As MySpace's popularity spiraled, the "unblock" requests for myspace.com were coming in at a rate of 5-10 per day. And they weren't all from students, staff were requesting open access as well.
First attempt to slow the tide: require valid login with unblock request
To reduce the number of requests BCSD staff had to comb through each day, they began requiring a valid login on the Lightspeed Systems "access denied" page where requests to unblock a site originate. Unfortunately, staff continued making the requests to unblock myspace.com, and students learned and used logins to continue fanning the flame.
Second attempt: avoid the block page altogether
So, with the carrot of social networking dangling out there just beyond the fence line, it's apparent that students can be a tenacious bunch. In addition to the unblock requests, students were making their way into MySpace backdoors using search engines. Which got the network administration staff thinking.
What if instead of getting the redirect page that affords an opportunity to request the site be unblocked, users were redirected to Yahoo.
Brilliant, but how do you do that with TTC and not affect every blocked site?
Answer: Create a custom category. TTC allows you to create as many categories as you want for your organization. So BCSD took myspace.com with all its subdomains in the Content Database Adult category (e.g., music.myspace.com) and reassigned them to their own MySpace category. Then the MySpace category's redirect page is set as http://www.yahoo.com.
Next, what if search results were blocked when students and staff searched for keywords that could land them at a backdoor. BCSD staff reviewed search queries to learn what keywords were being used to search for MySpace. Searches including words such as: myspace, my space, and common typos such as myspacecom are regularly added to the MySpace category keyword list so that backdoor access is also blocked without opportunity to plea for open access.
Voilà! No more access to MySpace; no more unblock requests for myspace.com.