Running afoul of websense

How do I get around it?

[wheel]

I manage a reasonably busy site for professionals, many of whom access the site from work. We are now being widely blocked by websense (a filter that blocks gambling sites, etc).

We were using phpBB but we just switched to vbulletin. At that time we took advantage of the subforum capability and set up our diversions area into the three games that these professionals like to play. One of them is poker (these professionals are mathematicians to a great extent). I believe it was this change that triggered the websense block - our content hasn't changed and we've never had this problem before.

While I don't know that we need to worry too much about having the games section blocked, some filters are blocking the whole site. It is a professional site, so that's not the best for the community - and a concern for me because it's seriously restricting us as we attempt to make this even more attractive to the professional community.

I would prefer not to move the games section offsite, I don't like the fragmentation. (plus, chess for example draws a lot of steady traffic). And the community has expressed concern over asking their IT department to open the block, as the site DOES have poker threads on it.

Help? Is there a way to get around this? We changed the forum name to 'the game that starts with p', but that didn't seem to help at all. What can I do?

[rogerd]

Does websense automatically adjust to the content, or is it a blacklist type of thing?

One issue, perhaps, is that once it blocks a site it won't see the changed content (i.e., eliminated gambling words).

[tys0n28]

I'm having similar problems on my site with Websense in the last couple weeks. I've found that having users visit me with my IP address works for now. My site has been classified as "Games".

I'm trying to find a more permanent solution to this problem - does anyone know of anything I can do?

A couple ideas - I believe Websense uses some kind of bot to check site content, will blocking this bot help?

My other idea was to create a fake page of my site, and then only display that when the visitor's IP address is from Websense. Then request Websense to re-evaluate my site. Anyone tried anything like that before?