Dynamic URLs are web addresses that change based on the user or device accessing the site and are commonly used by website hosting platforms, for example, “sites.google.com”. As blocking “sites.google.com” can cause issues with Google’s services, you must block a wildcard instead.
Before you begin
- You must have permission to manage Filtering .
- Your school must have Linewize Connect on your users’ devices.
- If your school uses Linewize Connect for Windows (without Companion Mode), macOS, or iOS, you must turn on Man-in-the-Middle (MITM).
Wildcards
Wildcards act as placeholders for any characters and are helpful when you need to match multiple web addresses at the same time. You can use wildcards in Content Filtering policies to allow or block specific keywords in web addresses.
Wildcards are useful for creating policies when:
- You don’t know the full web address or for dynamic URLs.
- There are multiple spellings of a term in the web address.
- You want to block multiple pages on the same website.
Wildcard formats
Important
Wildcards apply only to the website path, not to the domain or subdomain.
The wildcard symbol for Linewize Filter is the asterisk (*), and there are two ways of formatting wildcards for Filtering Policies.
|
Method |
Description |
Example |
|---|---|---|
|
Suffix match |
keyword/phrase* Filters all web addresses that match the address before the asterisk. |
If you block “sites.google.com/site/gam*”, then Linewize Filter will block any web address that starts with “sites.google.com/site/gam”, for example, game, games and gaming. |
|
Contains match |
*keyword/phrase* Filters all web addresses with that keyword or phrase in the web address. |
If you block “sites.google.com/*game*”, then any web address that starts with “sites.google.com/” and contains the keyword “game”, for example, “sites.google.com/view/unblocked-games-world” |
Table 1: Wildcard formats.
Filtering wildcards
Add domain to MITM inspection
- Go to Configuration > Mobile Agent.
- In the On Linewize Filter Network section, go to the Inspected setting.
- Search for the website’s domain or Signature and select it from the dropdown menu.
- Repeat step 3 for all websites you want to use wildcard filtering for.
- Repeat steps 2-4 in the Off Linewize Filter Network section.
- Select Save at the bottom of the page.
Create a Wildcard Content Filtering policy
- Create a Content Filtering policy as you would normally.
- In the Website type dropdown, enter the wildcard URL.
- Select Save Policy.