Breaking Free

Covenant Eyes has recently more than doubled the staff responsible for the scoring system which provides a score for each of the URL’s visited by members. Plus, our programming staff has provided some incredible database analysis tools that will greatly improve scoring analysis.

The main complaint we get is that reports show false positives. In the past few weeks, some of that has been a result of growing pains… mistakes made by our more inexperienced staff. However, those mistakes are rapidly disappearing, and you should see some great changes over the coming weeks and months.

Covenant Eyes’ scoring system enables us to do a number of cool things unavailable anywhere else:

1. Analysis of separate pages within a domain. For instance, the very useful site craigslist has some pages meant exclusively for adults, and which would be found objectionable by the vast majority of Covenant Eyes members. Other filters are unable to analyze the individual pages, and require blocking all of craigslist, or allowing all of craigslist. The same goes for myspace, google searches, ebay and amazon searches, etc.

2. Age-based sensitivity settings on the Covenant Eyes filter. With nine settings available on the filter, blocking progressively higher and higher scoring sites, the Filter Guardian is able to set the sensitivity level on the users on his/her account. Other filters simply have a blacklist - a yes or no, with no score attached.

3. New sites not available in any blacklist database can be detected by the Covenant Eyes scoring system.

Incidentally, the scoring is done by our servers based on criteria entered by the scoring staff. Not only would it be impossible to view and score the 700 million plus URl’s in our database, we wouldn’t want them to be exposed to any bad sites. So we let our servers do that work. The trick is to provide criteria that will properly identify the age-appropriateness of a site strictly from the name of the site and the contents in its source code. It’s a daunting task.

It is a certain group of users, primarily very active Internet users, who have gotten too many false positives. If you’re one of those, I hope you’ll bear with us as we work to improve on that!