Is Your Website Being Blocked?

Serious question. If you’re in the 75% of Rifle Clubs that actually have a website, is it being blocked by ISP filters, and would you know if it was?

Enter blocked.org.uk. Operated by the Open Rights Group, it will query a website from nodes on many British ISP networks, and with different filter settings to see whether your website is actually accessible - and if it isn’t, it makes it very easy to request an Unblock from the ISP in question.

Their research shows that some 10% of the top 100,000 websites in the UK are blocked by at least one ISP. Some of those are entirely reasonable. You would expect PornHub to be blocked if you had turned on a “KidSafe” filter. But unix.com - the Unix and Linux forums? What’s going on there that BT-Strict is taking umbrage!?

This is ridiculous, bloody ISPs being biased against Shooting. Get the pitchforks!

This is not a conspiracy, though it is tiresome to continually see the peaceful target-shooting community erroneously lumped in with “Weapons and Violence”. It’s the inevitable result of naive “child-friendly” filters and general misunderstandings by developers that results in “over-blocking”. Along with shooting organisations, it’s also common to see rehab sites blocked simply because they talk about alcohol or drugs. Take a look at their partial list of blocked sites (many of which have been successfully unblocked). Counselling, anti-bullying, quit-smoking and anti-suicide sites all get erroneously blocked on a regular basis because the naive filters scraping those sites for keywords struggle to infer context. Which is ironic considering many of those sites are specifically aimed at supporting children and teenagers!

So what can I do?

• Check your club’s website on blocked.org.uk, and request an unblock from anyone blocking it.

• Be unfailingly polite - as frustrating as it is, remember that the people receiving your request are essentially call-centre staff. Neither they nor their immediate colleagues are responsible for your site getting blocked. In fact, many companies outsource this work to third party service providers (who also provide filtering for school, library and corporate networks). They have to feedback reports of over-blocking or instigate their own whitelists. You want these people on-side!

• Try and help yourself. Consider carefully the content and wording of your site to avoid getting blocked in the first place.

And how do I do that last one? We’re a rifle club. We shoot firearms.

Certainly, but avoid evocative words like “weapon”. The OED definition of “weapon” is “a thing designed or used for inflicting bodily harm or physical damage.”

A modern target rifle or a Steyr LP2 does not fit that description. Certainly it could be used as such, but so could a cricket bat, and nobody has ever said “Look at that fine willow weapon” as a batsman walked out to the crease. Literally anything can be used as a weapon. Target Shooting Clubs are not using firearms as weapons (and many of the firearms we use are neither designed as, nor would be especially effective as weapons!), so don’t talk about them in such terms. It’s misleading to all concerned.

Yeah, but the law does specify air weapons

What of it? Your website is advertising and marketing. I don’t want to get too deep into Content Strategy here, but “air weapon” is a very specific definition in Firearms Law that serves a legislative and judicial purpose. It does not match the “Common English” meaning in much the same way that no-one has ever referred to their air pistol as an “air small-firearm”.

Nobody ever says “Have you got your air weapon?”. They say “Get your rifle out” or “Put your air pistol away”. The most effective use of an Anschutz 9003 as a “weapon” would be as a blunt club! It’s a piece of precision sports equipment; a rifle; an air rifle.

Your website should be discussing what you do, where you do it, when and why people would want to join you. There’s no reason or obligation to fill it with stilted legalese. Do yourself a favour and write in a manner which reflects that. Your website isn’t for you, it’s for the general public - for people who don’t know what you do but (hopefully!) want to learn more.

Maybe it’s all pedantic semantics. If you want to call yourself an “air weapons club” then that’s up to you. But it’s almost certainly not an accurate description of what your club actually does, and you’re making life difficult for yourself. Seriously: don’t get bogged down in legalese. Nobody cares. Except bots building block-lists.