Reporting Blocked URLs

As an alkasir user, you are able to report about URLs (whole website domains or URLs within websites) that you suspect are inaccessible due to intentional blocking.

But before you report the URL, it is best to first ensure the following:


  1. That your connection is working properly and that you can access other websites as occasionally, inaccessibility may be due to your own connection/settings.

  2. Try to access the website during different times of the day and from different computers as some websites may be temporarily offline or under maintenance.

  3. If the URL still fails, then you can proceed by reporting it as per the below instructions but after you ensure that the URL is allowed based on alkasir's policy.


Note:

    Version 1.2 of alkasir added the functionality of accepting particular URLs (e.g., wikipedia.org/tunisia) for domains that may not blocked (e.g., wikipedia.org)

After clicking on 'Report Blocked URLs' on the Action Menu, a new box will appear in which you could type in the URLs that you would like to report to have been blocked.



Entering URLs



    In the below example, four URLs were reported:




If any of those URLs were found to be blocked, then they may have to go to the moderators for approval and a decision will be taken to include them or not in the database so as to grant alkasir users access to them. If you would like to get an email with the moderators' decision, you could click on the 'Notify me of moderators' decision' checkbox. But before you do so, you should:

  1. Ensure that you have an account with alkasir.com (you can sign up here)

  2. Ensure that you have already logged into your account on alkasir.com



Then you could click on 'Submit' to proceed with the verification and reporting process.

Although there is no limit to how many websites you can submit, please understand that the longer the list, the more time it will take for your computer to process them and verify if they are blocked. Furthermore, if you add a (www.) before the website, the program will automatically check the domain once with the (www) and once without it as some ISPs may block the domain only if it has (www) while others may block both.


Submitting the URLs and waiting for verification

Once you submit the domains, the program will fetch a local version of each of the URL and send it to the server for comparison as shown below:





Verification process

Following that, your default browser would display the results of the verification process. As shown below, your browser will then display the results of the verification process for the URLs you submitted.

If for any reason, your alkasir settings are not correct and alkasir.com is blocked, then you will not be able to report any URL. Therefore, it is imperative that you set up alkasir properly before reporting.






In the above scenario, it was found that none of the reported URLs is blocked. If any were found to be blocked, you will get another message indicating so with more relevant information. If the blocked URLs are found to have been approved by moderators before (for another ISP/country), then the URL would be automatically included in your country and your alkasir program will automatically refresh within seconds to reflect the new number of blocked URLs. This will require that you refresh your proxy settings on your browser or restart it for you to access the newly added URLs.

But if the URL was not moderated before, moderators will decide as per alkasir's policy if the URL is acceptable or not. If you requested notification by email and were logged into your alkasir.com account, you will automatically receive an email with the moderators' decision.

Remember that reporting any URL is only needed once. When a URL is approved for any particular URL in any country, all users in that particular country should also be able to access that URL as well.