Today we announce several improvements to the Domain Tagging system, our content categorization engine, as well as two new categories that you can enable for your networks, effective immediately.
As with every new feature we deliver, these improvements were the direct result of your feedback. Our team spent weeks evaluating both the current categories and your suggestions, and ultimately we decided which categories need to be added and which ones could use a facelift. We got hundreds of requests from the Domain Tagging community through the “suggest a new category” link, we reviewed dozens of vibrant conversations in IdeaBank and our support team heard you loud and clear when your blocklists filled up.
Without further ado, here are the new additions:
Anime/Manga/Webcomic: Sites that host online comics, cartoons & graphic novels.
Web Spam: Click/Survey/Pharmaceutical: Redirect targets containing unwanted Sweepstakes/Survey/Advertisements for free merchandise, pharmaceutical spam or rolex distributions.
Starting today, if you’d like to block either of these categories, simply log in to your Dashboard and adjust your custom settings. Our team and the tireless Domain Tagging community has searched the Internet far and wide to ensure these categories are robust. They already include the most popular sites in these categories, and will get stronger and more comprehensive in short order. To our knowledge, OpenDNS is the first and only filtering service to offer a Web spam category, though Web spam is increasingly present online.
We’ve also decided to improve four existing categories, adding additional content to each. The Health and Fitness category will now include fitness-related sites, in addition to sites that offer information about health care and health services. We’ve also added video and real-time chat to the Chat category. Due to the increasing popularity of Martial Arts and MMA we’ve added it to our Sports category. Finally, our Classifieds category now includes sites with real estate and housing listings.
As the Internet evolves we’ll continue to evaluate our Web filtering categories and your requests to make sure we’re ahead of the curve. If you’d like to get more involved, join our Domain Tagging community and help make the Internet better for millions around the world!
