Blocking Online gaming sites (msn, yahoo, etc) Help! :)

Hi

If your using Websense then the Master Filter table has options to block online games in the games section, and as many of them are url specific you could add blocks to games.msn.com,zone.msn.com, games.yahoo.com etc

These filtered sections, do block gaming sites and leave the mail alone as our workplace used Websense up until late last year and my MSN online account was fine to access. Due to abuse of the internet system a quote system via Websense was introduced that only allowed one hour of free internet time ( didnt inclued any of the online gaming or other blocked sites ) for your own things like yahoo, gmail, MSN mail etc as for us all work related emails should be coming through workplace email address, if the web address was work related then that was fine for surfing all day if you wished.

Does your workplace have a policy on internet abuse? if not maybe work looking into adding that to the job contracts as many companies do these days. Easier to also trace users who abuse if they have their own user and password for network access as logs can be created from heavy users accounts.

Yes Hosts or Privacy > Settings in the browser could block as many of the online gaming sites you could find via the url, not seen any lists of hosts for these specific sites for download, so would need to to add them yourself and make sure using group policy that no users have access to change settings in the browser or edit hosts. This could be a short term fix while waiting for your corp to get a handle on Websenses options.

Some of the bigger ones are these

games.yahoo.com
uk.games.yahoo.com
games.yahoo.net
msngamecentre.co.uk
games.msn.com
zone.msn.com
arcade.ninemsn.com.au
pogo.com
miniclip.com
onlinegames.net
dailygames.com
armorgames.com
gamesoid.com
freeonlinegames.com