Australia has blocked my site !

JoeInSanDiego · #1 (**permalink**) 06-19-2005, 11:44 AM

and I have no idea why. www.woodsshop.com/

It seems that it may be because of Content, or it may be because of Copywrite issues, that is, they're afraid someone may copy my designs and I'll go after them, so to prevent this from ever happening, they've just blocked my site !

I have a clean site. I've looked at all my content and have no clue.

Has anyone ever run into this and delt with it succesfully ? Is there anywhere I can go to to get a review for unblocking my site ?

JoeInSanDiego · #2 (**permalink**) 06-19-2005, 11:54 AM

Oh, and would anyone know of a better place for me to post this question ?

**brian.mark** · #3 (**permalink**) 06-19-2005, 12:48 PM

You mean everyone in the country has access to your site blocked? How do you know this?

Are you able to ship these to Australia? If not, they could be doing you a favor. I'd prefer that we didn't get traffic from Australia, as that's just bandwidth we have to pay for from an area we don't sell to.

I'm still scratching my head on how you know that you're blocked in Australia.

Brian.

JoeInSanDiego · #4 (**permalink**) 06-19-2005, 01:47 PM

Well, I had one Aussie customer who wanted a set of Plans of one of my structures. He was able to see my site then. I didn't have my new Plans Page up yet, so I told him to hang on for a few weeks until I had my Plans page up. As soon as I had that new page up, he wasn't able to see my site. He did some checking with his ISP, and found out I was being blocked.

Since then I've asked him and a few other Aussies to give me a Trace Route to my site, and none of them can get to my site. Plus I get maybe 600 hits a day, and in the last month I've only had 6 Aussie visitors. Seems like I should be geting alot more.

So, it seems like it was after I put up my new Plans page http://woodsshop.com/Plans.htm
that this started happening, but I can't be sure about this. I do know that Australia has some pretty tought filtering rules.

Brian, I doubt I'd be selling any Kits there, but I might just sell a few plans.

JoeInSanDiego · #5 (**permalink**) 06-19-2005, 04:50 PM

Here is what the original Aussie told me after he contacted his ISP ..

"Gday Joe,
My ISP technical officer rang today & spoke to my wife, they told her, now get this the" Australian Federal Police " have blocked your website & they don't have to give a reason."

and here is some more onfo ..

"As I told you originally, this is a localized issue and has nothing to do with your web host or the Internet backbone,etc etc. It's simply a case of an ISP filtering your site. Apparently it's happening in more than one place, so I would suggest figuring out what is on your site that is causing it to be blocked, and remove or re-configure that particular stuff. Many ISPs use the same software tools so if you're on the blacklist at one, you're going to be on the black list at many. Remember, they are trying to avoid problems with their subscribers and possibly their governments' decency laws. This is not a conspiracy against deck builders :-) One thing your people should do - find out what blacklist programs these ISPs are using. That will give us much better clues about what will be required to remove yourself. "

so folks, I sure hope someone comes along who's delt with this before.

**brian.mark** · #6 (**permalink**) 06-19-2005, 05:19 PM

That's a new on on me. Never heard of it. Is this something new that they're doing, or have they been doing this for a long time? Anyone have any info? I'm really interested in this one as well.

Brian.

JoeInSanDiego · #7 (**permalink**) 06-19-2005, 08:04 PM

Here's some info on the Australian censorship ..

http://www.caslon.com.au/censorshipguide9.htm#Australia

here's some more info from other folks trying to help me ..

"Joe
I found the information Under the "Technology Studies" I cut and paste one section of the article. I do not know how the process works for return of your site. I read up on Altavista "TOS" during some of the research and one term mentioned once offending material is removed the pages will connect..I don't know if the same practice applies to Government censorship.

technology studies-

As noted earlier in this guide, content labelling is problematical: it's frequently hit and miss, it's consistently over-hyped, and endorsement by government in Australia and overseas is ill-founded.

Filters lauded in Australia have excluded the most benign of sites while permitting access to those with 'explicit' content. Studies of the "state-of-the-art" BAIR filter - endorsed alas by the Commonwealth government - in June 2000 demonstrated that while it excludes access to images of dogs, journalists, trees and vegetables it rates images of group and oral sex as acceptable fare for the kids.

Here's more info from the horses mouth ..

http://www.dcita.gov.au/broad/online...ent_regulation