In the Unblock Page of the Dashboard, sometimes the assessment for a domains is shown as “detected NNFW”. I can’t see in the manual or the forum the meaning of this; googling this abbreviation doesn’t reveal any relevant results either. Apologies if I’ve missed it.
I’m increasingly finding that many URLs are flagged with a red “x” however analysing them with www.virustotal.com shows no concerns. Many of the websites requested are benign looking churches or charities. Is the filtering criteria possibly too strict? Should more sites be classed as “unknown” instead? From a user’s point of view if I as an admin didn’t allow any red X or unknown, most users would only be able to access probably at best 30% of their requested sites!
1 Like
Hi @BrightSpark
We are always tweaking the auto unblocking features and one thing that was added awhile ago was a tag called NNFW which stands for Not Needed for Work.
The timing of your question is great as we are working on a support article that goes into more detail on exactly how the auto unblocking works and what kinds of things are rejected, allowed, or marked for review.
We’ll update this post with a link to the article when it’s available.
The article is now live here Auto Whitelisting Filtered Categories
Thank you Arthur, that article is both very helpful to understand the criteria better and to keep management/users informed. NNFW wasn’t an abbrievation I’d come across. Might be worth a link to this article in the manual too for new users?
A few follow up points if I may please:
- This isn’t just for the auto whitelisting feature - NNFW comes up in manual whitelisting which we’re using at the moment for instance.
- As I work with a church, “religion” is very much needed for work, its not “NNFW”. Shouldn’t there be a choice for the admin about categories, like there is in OpenDNS for instance?
- My second question about possibly overly protective protection/false positives remains unanswered as yet.
Keep up the great work!
It is overly protective on purpose as we’d rather have good things get blocked than bad things getting through.
It is on our roadmap to allow these settings to be customized on a per-site basis. In the case of religion for example it’s not that religion itself is a potential issue, but many are concerned about what types of religion get through which is why it is flagged for manual review now.
The article has been updated to make a few things more clear. Hope this helps.
Per-site customization doesn’t sound like it would help. It’s per-category customization that makes more sense to me. My kids look up Christian content all the time and it’s irritating to have it constantly flagged like porn and malware are.
When I mentioned per-site above I meant site as a network or location. Not a domain.