Now you can employ time limits on browsing
Published in CensorNet Professional on May 16, 2009 by Administrator
In the latest releases of CensorNet (1.4.20 and 1.5.7 at the time of writing)[1] we have introduced time based quotas.
In one sense these have always been available as you could have defined a specific policy with specific rules which you could then schedule into the day at a set time. However, this did not cover the fact where you were happy to allow your users to browse certain sites for a certain time, but did not want to specify exactly when that usage should occur within the working day.
Time based quotas resolve this by working in exactly that way. When you create a new policy, or modify an existing one, there is a Time Quota setting field immediately under the Block/Allow rules and Dynamic sites modifiers. The default value is 15 minutes, but you can select a time limit from a wide range of values available in the drop down selector.
Having specified the quota limit that applies for that policy, for any category set to “Allow” in either the Custom URL module or Content Classifier module, you can check the quota box.
URLs that fall within categories under quota control can then only be browsed for the time limit you set. When the quota is exceeded the user receives a block message explaining that the site is now blocked because the quota has been reached.
Each user has their own quota so the fact one user on a policy is suddenly being blocked due to quota exception, another may still be able to reach a site. The quotas for each user are reset at Midnight.
For a URL that falls into multiple categories, the quota will apply if any one category is quota controlled, even if the other categories are not.
[1] For the time being we are keeping the 1.4.x and 1.5.x versions of CensorNet synchronised. They are functionally identical, only the underlying operating system is different. If you are still running CensorNet 1.3.x we recommend that you upgrade to CensorNet 1.5.x by following the migration instructions. If you are running 1.4.x you will eventually have to upgrade to 1.5.x. We will announce when this is necessary.
