This morning I noticed an email asking about a domain being blocked by Barracuda’s Web Filter due to a classification of “advertisement-pop-ups”. The implication of the note was that Barracuda was accusing a particular site of running pop-up advertisements.

After doing some research and talking with someone who knows, here’s the skinny:

“Advertisement-pop-ups” is a catch-all category that covers lots and lots of territory. It covers anything dealing with advertising, whether it is a domain that serves pop-ups or handles click-tracking for an email service provider, or a banner ad network.

I think it’s poorly named. The categorization is framed in such a way that you cannot blame someone for thinking that there is a meta-category named “Advertisement” and a sub-category of “pop-ups”. Doubtless, there are lots and lots of web filter admins who are blocking this singular category on the assumption that they’re only blocking a bunch of pop-up domains.

I’m told that this is an industry standard and that it might be possible to see that by searching Google and DMOZ. And it might be an industry standard to lump everything into one group, but I doubt that the naming schema is an industry standard. Just a couple of clicks around on Google and DMOZ revealed a number of such schemas, and some levels of additional granularity which aren’t apparent in the Barracuda set up.

The administrator, of course, has the ability to whitelist specific domains. If you find your domain hit by this categorization and deal with advertising in any way, then realize that it’s probably a righteous listing and domain-level whitelisting by the web filter administrator is going to be the only recourse available.