This week we will be taking the final step to remove the Cults, Religious Opinion and Outdoor Recreation categories from the 8e6 Database.

These categories have been empty since March, when, the URLs in the Religious Opinion and Cults categories were moved into the Religion category and the URLs in the Outdoor Recreation category was moved into the Recreation category.

We decided to eliminate the Religious Opinion and Cults categories to limit the legal liability that 8e6 faces in making the distinction between what is a “religion” and what is a “cult”. This distinction has different meanings to different people; one person’s religion is another person’s cult and vice versa.

We’re removing the Outdoor Recreation category simply for simplicity. Customer surveys indicated that almost nobody considered it to be an actionable category. The distinction from Recreation was immaterial to folks’ filtering policies. This also reflects our on-going vision for the Master Library to be broad and simple in benign categories and specific and granular in threat categories.

A few notes:

This change will only affect the R3000 version 2.0 and higher. We added the ability to add and delete 8e6 supplied categories via configuration in that release. Releases prior to that will continue to display these categories, although since they are empty, setting policy on them will not have any affect on the end users’ web browsing.

If you have added URLs to any of the these categories, haven’t gotten around to moving them to a custom category, and want to keep them, then Tech Support can help you. When we delete categories, customer added URLs are still in text files inside the R3000. Tech Support can grab them and get them for you.

The built-in CIPA rule will be affected by this change. Since the Cults category will no longer exist, it will no longer be in the rule.

Tags: 8e6 Database, categories, cults, library, outdoor recreation, religion, religious opinion

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 27th, 2007 at 3:59 pm and is filed under 8e6 Database. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.