Steemit finally whitelisted by Symantec

Before I start writing about this, I have to say that I'm very happy on this because it is not just me who gets benefits from this but many people all over the world will be benefited because of this. Please continue reading further to know more details.

In some of the corporate companies, not all the websites are accessible. Some corporate companies and educational institutions block websites with the help of a proxy. This is definitely great news for the steemit users or at least for me because I have been struggling for a long time without this. I wrote an article long back about my difficulty in using steemit inside my office network. In my office, they use Symantec blue coat categorization to filter unwanted sites. For the past one year, I have been trying different options to use steemit and the DApps built on the steem blockchain. I was getting the below exception message.

There is an option available in the Symantec Bluecoat website to claim a website and recommend a particular category for a website. I tried changing the category of Steemit.com to other categories than Mixed COntent/Potentially Adult. But it was never considered. My request was continuously rejected multiple times. By then I did not read the email properly. At the bottom of the emails that I get from Symantec, it mentioned that I can contact them directly by replying to the email. Today I sent an email to them asking why they are not considering my request to change the category of Steemit.com. Surprisingly I received a positive email from them.

Advantages of this category change

Symantec proxy exception service is being used by many corporate companies. With this wrong categorization, many people were unable to access Steemit.com from their official networks. I personally struggled a lot and somehow managed to use Busy.org as my user interface for accessing steem in my office.

I was also having challenges in talking about steem to some of my office colleagues. Whenever I explain this to them, they ask me to show them the website and when I say it is not accessible from the office network, they laugh. I used to be embarrassing for me to even talk about steemit in my office. But now with this new change, many people will now be able to access steemit.com from their office that uses Symantec proxy.

The advantage is not just for steemit alone but for all the DApps built on the steem blockchain. Most of the DApps including steemconnect use api.steemit.com to connect their user interface with the blockchain. If Steemit is blocked by the proxy, the other DApps that are dependent on Steemit API will also have issues. If I try to explore something when I have spare time in office, it will not be possible because the website is blocked. I used to switch to other user interfaces like Busy to read an article. But now, I will feel very comfortable to use Steemit.com from my office network itself so that I can spend some more time reading something interesting from Steemit when I have time.