One of the most useful features in WOT are the embedded reputation indicators on web search results. As you have noticed, they are not just for search though. In this post I will show how to configure where and how these reputations are shown.
Being integrated to your browser, the WOT add-on can add reputations to practically any link on a website. We maintain a list of sites where we believe reputations are most useful, and you can see it on the Browsing page of the add-on preferences:
Here you can disable reputation indicators for any of the listed websites, or for all of them if you prefer. You can also configure the add-on to show reputations only if they are bad. Link backgrounds can optionally be highlighted and you can even have a small information popup window that tells you the exact reputations in each category without having to visit the site first.
The current list of selected websites includes all the popular search engines, Google's GMail webmail, Wikipedia in all languages, and some of the more popular social networking sites we ourselves use every day. Most recently today we added support for reddit.com:
My question to you is: are we missing any websites you'd like to see in the list? If there is a site where you think embedded reputations would be useful, please let us know. Post a comment below or send us feedback.
Like all web services, WOT requires a bit of maintenance occasionally to keep it going. Due to it's omnipresent nature, we do our best to keep this from affecting the quality of our service. However, sometimes service disruptions are unavoidable. In this post we'll keep you updated on upcoming service outages.
Our normal maintenance window for the WOT system is on every Sunday from 08:00 to 12:00 UTC. During this time you may experience intermittent disruptions in service.
2007-06-03: Software upgrade may result in the service being briefly unavailable during the maintenance window.
2007-04-22: Database maintenance may result in the service being occasionally unavailable during the maintenance window.
Children are being exposed to the web at a much younger age than before these days. Therefore, keeping them safe while they're online has become ever more important. While software is never a substitute for parental oversight, WOT provides some options that can help make Firefox safer for your kids.
The warnings in WOT can be configured from the add-on preferences. You can select in which categories you are warned and how the warnings are shown. One of the options is to block access to dangerous websites entirely. If you enable warnings for sites that are unsafe for children and enable blocking, WOT will stop Firefox from loading websites that have a reputation for being unsuitable for children:
You can also easily block any website regardless of its reputation by giving it a bad testimony in the child safety category. Similarly, you can unblock a website by temporarily disabling blocking and giving the site a good testimony in the categories where it is considered dangerous.
Of course, this will only prevent kids from accidentally ending up on an unsuitable website. The blocking can easily be disabled from preferences, so it won't stop your older children from surfing where ever they prefer. You should also notice that when blocking is enabled, WOT will load reputations before the website loads, which will cause a slight delay when visiting a new site. The add-on caches reputations, so any subsequent visits to the same site during the browsing session won't be any slower though.
There are nearly a million websites in the our database whose reputation is currently bad enough to get blocked in one or more categories, but still, this is most likely not a comprehensive list of all the sites you'd rather not have your kids seeing. Luckily, WOT makes it easy for our user community to change that. Sharing your knowledge can really help make the web safer for everyone.
