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I have a question about my Webmasters Stack Exchange post: Why is my site being blocked by firewalls (like FireEye and Symantec)?

Why would this question be targeted?

  • The subject is precisely how someone might type a research question in to a search engine.
  • The problem body is broad, in a way to help others, while also helping me specifically.
  • There are lots of keywords to make it searchable.
  • Before it was quickly targeted for closure, it already had a helpful comment, essentially proving it was effective!
  • Legitimate answers such as, "try it against this 3rd party service" or, "mixed content may block", would be helpful to me and others who have had this precise problem.
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  • It appears the OP chose to delete their account, so further discussion is likely unwarranted.
    – dan Mod
    Nov 5, 2018 at 5:06

2 Answers 2

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The close reason given is because we don't do site reviews here. You can't come here and just ask "What is wrong with my site?" We have that policy because site reviews don't tend to be very useful to others in the future and we would get too many of them to answer. You are basically asking for a site review to figure out what could be the problem with firewalls. There isn't much info in your post that we could use to answer your question other than visiting your site.

On the other hand, the question would be very broad if you removed your site from the question and asked "Why could a site be blocked by firewalls?" There are too many reasons that sites could be blocked to adequately cover in a few paragraphs here.

Another problem with your post from our perspective is that it asks "Is there a place to test?" Such requests for 3rd party resources tend to attract spammy answers and vote wars. We have a policy here that we don't allow questions that ask for 3rd party recommendations. You would need to remove that request from your question.

If you had some guesses about what the problem might be you could ask those individually. Something like "Could having an image of a shotgun on my home page cause my site to get blocked?"

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Steven already covered the reasons why your question was put on hold, which I agree with, so I'll just add to that a little background about how this site operates which might help to explain things further:

Each Stack Exchange site has its own criteria and guidelines as to what the community considers to be on-topic and off-topic. Those criteria/topics result from discussions on their Meta sites, and are then listed in their Help Center on the Main site under What topics can I ask about here?

If you review the above link you'll see the topics that we cover, and the ones we've decided are off-topic and would result in a question being put on hold. Under Off-topic questions, there are two criteria that this question would fall under:

Specific to only your site - If the answers to your question could only apply to your site, it is probably not a good fit for Pro Webmasters. For example, we would close questions such as "What am I doing wrong here?" or "Please review my site."

As both Simon and Steven indicated, your question falls under this off-topic reason because it's essentially asking the above questions. As a standard practice we remove URLs to individual sites because of this, and because they're often added for reasons of self-promotion. If we remove your URL (which I have done for that reason, but it's still available under edit for users to view), the question then becomes very broad and would require an open-list of possible reasons, which doesn't fit very well with the specific question and answer format of these sites. Broadly-scoped questions like this not only make it difficult to answer succinctly and definitively, but also for the community to vote on and for the OP to accept them as the "best" answer.

Recommendations for sites and resources -- Questions that ask for recommendations of external websites or resources attract lots of self promotion and spam answers. In addition, answers to such questions quickly become out of date. Such questions are closed as off-topic.

Since we're a relatively smaller site but with a lot of exposure in the search engines and via our network of sites, we tend to get a lot of spam and self-promotional posts. To avoid that, most Stack Exchange sites have decided to put those on hold as off-topic, with the exception of Software Recommendations, which was started for that very reason and has very specific guidelines as to what they consider to be on-topic there.

So why do we have all these restrictions you might ask? So that these sites can be a quality resource for others, with well-vetted questions and answers. The down-side is that it often takes some trial and error to learn the ropes. Everyone, myself included, has to learn what those restrictions are and how to adjust to them in order reap the rewards of quality (free) help. Here's a link on how you can write good questions.

Now if you can edit the question based on Simon's comments, which took some effort to do and were meant to be helpful, to something more specific without requiring us to review your site, then it would be put in the review queue to be reviewed by the community and likely reopened. For example, you could ask:

I have mixed HTTP and HTTPS content on my site, could that result in it being blocked by firewalls and filters like FireEye and Symantec?

Lastly, it's best to consider that users are volunteering their time on these sites to try to help others. With that perspective in mind, you might find that being respectful and appreciative for any help, if even in attempt to explain why something doesn't fit very well, that will be to your benefit. As the saying goes, you catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar…which if you replace "flies" with "answers" is especially true on these sites.

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