Blocking/Allowing websites with GoGuardian Admin.

This guide will walk you through allowing domains and subdomains you wish to block and or allow. Keep in mind that the allow list will always override the block list (including category blocks).

This only applies to a single policy environment. For more information check out Policies and Policy Inheritance.

To get to your Policies from the GoGuardian Admin dashboard, click on configuration from the left-hand menu. 

From here, select the policy you wish to add the block or allowed site into.

Note: If the Policy you wish to edit is grayed out, that may indicate that your account does not have access to an OU that the Policy is assigned to (based on the sub-org access settings your Super User has set on your account in Org Management). If that is the case, we recommend creating a new Policy that includes any additional blocks/allowances you wish to add and assigning that Policy to the OU that you have access to. You can read more about this here.

You will then enter the domain/subdomain and choose block or allow.

Here are a few examples.

1) Let’s say you want students to be able to access docs.google.com (a subdomain), but not Google.com (a domain) or any other Google subdomains (such as sheets.google.com):

• Add “google.com” to your block list (this will also block all subdomains)
• Add “docs.google.com” to your allow list (this will override the block list for this subdomain only)

2) If you wanted to allow Google.com but didn’t want students to be able to get to hangouts.google.com:

• Add "hangouts.google.com" to the block list

*There is no need to add google.com to the allow list, as students should be able to access google.com by default (unless a policy in Restrictive Mode is being applied).

3)  Websites you want to students or faculty to access can fall into blocked categories. coolmathgames.com will fall under 2 categories: Online Games, Educational Games. If you wish to block this category but allow this site, you can do this with an allow rule:

• Add "coolmathgames.com" to the allow list.

4) Subdomains for blocked websites. Prodigygame.com is a popular site that is used by students as an educational game. Users may want most educational games blocked, but to allow prodigygame.com. Prodigygame has subdomains for login such as play.prodigygame.com. If we only have prodigygame.com allowed, the subdomains will continue to be blocked unless specifically allowed as play.prodigygame.com or *prodigygame.com. 

***Don't forget! Policy changes can take up to 15 minutes to take effect. One way to speed up the process is to visit chrome://restart on the device browser.***

For more ways to block websites and keywords check out Best Practices: Advanced Filtering Tips.