I met up with Newsgal Extraordinaire A at Brookline’s Coolidge Corner Panera Bread for brunch today.  She was delayed so I booted up my laptop and availed myself of Panera’s free wifi. After tweeting a bit, I headed on over to this very website and was greeted with this screen:

“Forbidden Category ‘Other'”?  Well, it’s nice of them to include the link for appeal.  So I followed it.

According to the fine folks at SonicWall, limeduck.com is “Category 4: Pornography”!  Good grief!  I didn’t think I’d ever committed more than Category 3.  Well, I submitted a request to be reclassified, and we’ll see what comes of that.  I have to wonder how this happened in the first place.  I’m sure the firewall guys use all matter of automated “intelligence” to rate the multitude of sites out there, and they must get it wrong now and again.  Self-indulgent, long-winded, willfully obscure, sure, but when has anything gone on here that could trick a robot into seeing porno?  (Sure, I’ve used the word “porn” plenty of times, but how many real porn sites have that much text?)  Maybe it’s somebody’s idea of a practical joke, going around classifying blogs as indecent.

Frankly I’m a little surprised Panera would even bother to implement a content filter like this where the default on unknown sites seems to be blockage.  It’s got to be costing them some money and it’s prone to errors like this one.  I hate to throw the brioche out with the firewall, but until this gets fixed, Panera Bread is dead to this dirty duck.