What happens when the service desk is asked to ban a website?

When the service desk staff are alerted to the need to examine a web site this is immediately acted upon. The outcome, however, will vary. If the website should have been categorized by Symantec in such a way as to make it inaccessible to the LLN community or parts of the community then it is immediately blocked and the URL is forwarded to Symantec for categorization. If the request for a site to be banned is felt to be one that would not be required by the whole LLN community then the sender of the request will be advised. In some cases bans for the whole leeds community are not an appropriate response. These areas are typically those where a school needs to define and enforce an 'acceptable use policy' with rules of conduct that are specific to the school and which encompass types of site which the school considers unacceptable. An example would be one Leeds high school that has banned the use of 'Hotmail' accounts by its pupils, insisting that the pupils use the LLN provided email addresses so that incoming and outgoing email is tracked and filtered. A global ban on 'Hotmail' type email would have produced an outcry! If you consider that a request for a ban has not been handled in what you would consider an appropriate manner then please contact Patrick Kirk (pvkirk@leedslearning.net).