[Delta Dragon]

I was out to sea for the last 3 months. With no wi-fi and 12 hour (sometimes 16 hours) work days, 7 days a week, I needed some Total Miner to help relax after a hard day of work. So getting back into Total Miner after a long period of time, I found that there was much to learn and while the in-game tutorials help me understand the very basics, I wanted to get back on the TM Forums to read other people's tutorials for things such as scripts and behaviors and share my own insight and questions. I can use my ship's computer to access the internet (at speeds on par or slower than I remember dail-up being) but I am still limited by the ship's network restriction on "gaming" websites. Here's where the problem lies, when I try to access TM Forums, I get a message that this website is listed as a gaming website and gaming websites are blocked.

To find out why gaming sites are blocked by my Command (since "normal people" sites like Facebook and LinkedIn are accessible) I asked some of my buddies who work in that field. Basically, gaming websites are notorious for being riddled with ads and other things that eats up bandwidth. Understandable since there's over 5,000 people on board and there needs to be fair bandwidth usage. I would at least watch the YouTube tutorials but they ended up blocking that site also towards the end of our underway for bandwidth issues. Now, I don't know too much about interwebs stuff, but I can't imagine TMF being that big of a drain on bandwidth, especially when I consider that Facebook is bloated with ads and video streaming.

I have no problems accessing non-gaming related forums and even some obscure gaming websites. I hope someone here can help me find a way to access the Forums for when I go back out to sea. Maybe even change the listing of the site from "gaming" to something else? Maybe @bob can help? Again, I don't know too much on this stuff so any help here would be appreciated. I hope I posted this in the right spot and thanks for reading, guys.

[bob]

I'm not sure there's anything I could do to change how the site is listed on their internal blocklist. It's probably being generated either by Google or via scanning for commonly used words. In either case there isn't too much I could do to help, messing with the google search terms would also have the side effect of tanking our search rankings and making it next to impossible to find the site. And "game" or "gaming" would definitely be in the top 5 most commonly used words on the site, so if they're just keyword counting then it would definitely flag us there.

I'd say go through a proxy server..but I have a feeling those are blocked as well.

Do you have any access to your own devices, or are you completely reliant on the equipment on the ship? If you can possibly use your own devices, using the tapatalk app would probably get you around the restrictions. Link for it is all the way down on the bottom of the page,

Or the worst case scenario if you can't find any other workable solution. Find out who is in charge of networking on the ship and ask him to take a look at the site. If they don't have a problem with forums and the problem lies with ads, then you should be ok with asking for an exception. I don't have any ads on the site and no plans to add any in the future, and forums use basically nothing as far as bandwidth is concerned.

[Delta Dragon]

I really appreciate your reply and info on this, Bob. I tried asking around some more and definitely doesn't look like I'm going to be able to get any restrictions lifted. For one, big Navy blocks video game sites so even if I could convince anyone that Total Miner Forums is a safe site, they won't be able to do anything about it on the ship. Also, I'm definitely not allowed to plug any of my own personal stuff into the network. I just decided to go through the forum and save some tutorial videos and PDFs of tutorial threads and hope that'll get me through the next few months. Again, I am very grateful for the help.

[bob]

No problem. If I can think of anything else I'll let you know, but I'm kind of drawing a blank here as far as ideas go.