please help me -- how to block certain websites...

  • Thread starter Thread starter lucy
  • Start date Start date
L

lucy

Hi all,

Please hlep me. I want to help my kid focus on his study more... instead of
focusing on web-surfing all day and all nights...

What can I do?

What's the easiest way to block some websites from browsing?

I don't want it to display "Your website is blocked, please ask your network
administrator"... this way, my kid can often ask my wife(who is
soft-hearted) to remove the blockage...

So ideally if it can display "404 The website cannot be connected", this
would be great! So my kid will "disappointedly" find the website is not
connectable at all.

At the same time, I also want those good websites(science, math, etc.) to be
still available...

Please help me! How to do that easily? I am not a very technical person!

Thanks a lot!

L
 
lucy said:
Hi all,

Please hlep me. I want to help my kid focus on his study more... instead of
focusing on web-surfing all day and all nights...

What can I do?

What's the easiest way to block some websites from browsing?

I don't want it to display "Your website is blocked, please ask your network
administrator"... this way, my kid can often ask my wife(who is
soft-hearted) to remove the blockage...

So ideally if it can display "404 The website cannot be connected", this
would be great! So my kid will "disappointedly" find the website is not
connectable at all.

At the same time, I also want those good websites(science, math, etc.) to be
still available...

Please help me! How to do that easily? I am not a very technical person!

Thanks a lot!
Click to expand...

Hi

Provided you only want to block a small number of sites, you could use
the hosts file.

The error your kid will see is:

"The connection was refused when attempting to contact to <whatever site
you blocked>"

Here's how:

In Explorer, browse to C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc. Then open the
'hosts' file in Notepad.

It will probably have a bunch of comment-lines (starting with #), and
this entry:

127.0.0.1 localhost

which shouldn't be deleted. To block, say, www.wasteoftime.com, simply
enter:

127.0.0.1 www.wasteoftime.com

There should be at least 1 space between the IP address and the name,
and each site should be on a line by itself, e.g.:

127.0.0.1 localhost
127.0.0.1 www.wasteoftime.com
127.0.0.1 www.noteducationatall.com

It's probably a good idea to back up your hosts file before you modify
it. To do this, right-click the hosts file, click Copy, then click Paste
in the same window. Rename "Copy of hosts" to hosts.bak or somesuch.

Obviously, if you wanted to block hundreds of sites, this would be
impracticable, so you'd need some other way.
 
You can enable a feature called Content Advisor in Internet Explorer. Click
Tools and then select Internet Options and click on the Content Tab.. Enable
it there
 
San said:
You can enable a feature called Content Advisor in Internet Explorer. Click
Tools and then select Internet Options and click on the Content Tab.. Enable
it there
Click to expand...

Unfortunately, the Content Advisor relies on websites to rate themselves, and
very very very few do so. AFAIK, M$ never twisted any arms to make this CA
useful, so it isn't IMHO.
 
Back
Top