A rant on school filters, and student-created websites.

I’m 13. I have loads of websites. Check the services list. See? This website, along with my others, is a complex piece of clockwork, requiring serious modding, coding, and general grit. As more and more people fly into technology, most start with creating websites, and that’s spreading across schools globally.

Now, I get that most people use Weebly and Wix, which is fine! They’re already unblocked from most school filters, but for the 7% that go the extra mile, managing three or four more domains, and doing “self-created” sites on WordPress, MyBB, Jenkins, and a whole bunch more, it’s much more of a hassle to get your site unblocked from any school filter. Have one game under an .swf file, and your site is blocked, until you get a hold of an IT administrator.

However, what I now have to go through to get this site unblocked is going too far, and angering me a little too much. By no means is this an all out rant, but I feel like schools need to create a unified policy for student-created websites going through their filter.

I now need to fill out an application to get my site unblocked. I have no clue what that’s gonna throw at me, but here’s my scope on it, and what I think should be done for a unified system for schools to allow student sites.

All the student would have to do is contact their IT Administrator, in person or via. email, and ask for their site to be unblocked, specifying that it should be unblocked. After that, all the student does is answer simple questions.

• Why do you want this site unblocked
• What would be the purpose of having this site unblocked (the catch here is that if it’s not educational to the school, it’s probably educational to the student, as they are learning new things with the website they created.)

And that’s it. After that, the IT or the filter would do a full scan of the site for any bad content (considering my site is around the 30k file mark…it would take a while…). If there was offending content, the student should have the ability to explain why it’s there, instead of an instant block.

By no means is this a rant-my-pants-off rant since I actually encountered this today as of this writing, just a way to think of to get student websites unblocked on the filter easily. As we move into the 21st century, websites are a great way to get your voice, and your work out there, and it should be available at schools, so students can work on them there, and show friends.

And that’s my proposal.