Why London Grid For Learning blocks GitHub, and why they shouldn't

Update: London Grid For Learning has gone back on this decision, meaning that GitHub is now accessible in schools, atleast for my research

Hi all! Today, I decided to check out an XFCE theme which is based on OneShot World Machine, only to be greeted by this error message here:

This message (known as LGFL SchoolProtect) is what you see when you try to access a blocked website, either by LGFL or with a local list.

This block wasn't issued recently, but rather a few months ago when LGFL blocked GitHub for being a gaming platform, which it isn't within itself. At the time of its block, GitHub pages with games were very popular, so it's no surprise

that LGFL took action on it.

Why this is a bad idea

There are of course, several disadvantages to this block, but I'll name one: they blocked the wrong domain. To put it simply, these pages are hosted on an entirely different domain (github.io), which is GitHub's user page hosting domain. This specific domain however (for the most part) isn't blocked, and to further prove this, I pulled up my GitHub readme which is set up to run on GitHub pages:

This is just more proof that even big companies screw up sometimes, but this is probably one of the biggest screw ups I've seen from a company focused on education - they literally can't tell the difference between .com and .io, and they should have done further research before going further.

Anyways, that's it! Ralzi out!