6 ms·

Some Schools Are Blocking Replit to Prevent Kids from Coding

37 points by amasad 6y ago

chmod600 6y ago
Why? Is there any reason to block it?
- mathieuh 6y ago
  Could be they overzealously blocked a load of things that could be used to cheat on exams (a REPL can be used as a calculator). Never attribute to malice etc. Not saying it’s right but I think it’s unlikely there’s some nefarious current in teaching to stop kids learning to program.
- space_ghost 6y ago
  From the petition[0]: "Some schools have called the site a "distraction" as kids are choosing to learn computer science and programming as opposed to working on other subjects." [0]: https://www.change.org/p/schools-of-the-world-unblock-replit-at-schools https://www.change.org/p/schools-of-the-world-unblock-replit...
  - throwaway3699 6y ago
    I don't get why this is an issue. I slacked off on many boring subjects to do the same. Building software and other digital stuff helped me think like an entrepreneur, and was a hell of a lot more educational than the rest of school.
    - BitwiseFool 6y ago
      While the goal of schooling is cultivate young minds and educate them, the reality is that schools are an institution that must implement a curriculum and they expect students to do as they are told.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - chmod600 6y ago
    Is this a widespread phenomenon, or a few dumb administrators in a few places? The article doesn't give much context. In a country of 350M people, "some" schools are going to block hopscotch or using improper fractions for whatever dumb reason. Why should I care?
  - weeblewobble 6y ago
    Very peculiar sentence. The word "distraction" is quoted but the rest of the sentence, the strongest claim, is not quoted. Where does the "are choosing to learn computer science and programming as opposed to working on other subjects" come from? It is implicitly attributed to "some schools", but which schools? did they really say that, or is the author paraphrasing something they said? or is it the author's interpretation or guess of their motivation? Or perhaps this is viral marketing, or in other words, BS.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- chomp 6y ago
  Title is probably sensationalist. More likely that stretched IT departments at schools implement one-size-fits-all content blockers for websites and this particular site is caught up in a blocked category. I have strong doubts that schools are collaboratively targeting and blocking repl.it in particular.
  - Wistar 6y ago
    My spouse is a teacher and can confirm that their IT dept uses a very broad brush in blocking things on the network. Many of the blocks are of sites that have become important teaching resources such as pinterest.
    - mytailorisrich 6y ago
      If a pupil somehow manages to access pornographic, violent, racist, whatnot content the school is going to be in trouble. The safest and simplest is to block liberally. No-one is going to be in trouble for blocking Pinterest.
      - Wistar 6y ago
        I think that an IT department should have enough wherewithal to be able to distinguish between student accessible resources and teacher accessible resources.
    - lostlogin 6y ago
      Pinterest themselves go a long way towards breaking Google. Their crappy spam prevents you getting to the actual source of an image. I can’t believe Google tolerate it.
threatofrain 6y ago
> Many schools have decided to start filtering out sites such as Replit which allows students to code in the browser. Which schools are blocking these coding sites? Why is it so hard to find on this petition?
- avvt4avaw 6y ago
  "Many" schools. Why do you need more information than that? It must be a lot of schools, since it says "many".
  - Varriount 6y ago
    "Many" is a subjective term. It doesn't tell you anything quantifiable, merely what the describer thinks is a larger than usual number. For example, someone who has never owned pets might think that someone who owns 2 cats and a dog has "many" pets, while someone who does own pets might only consider that to be a "normal" number of pets.
    - woopwoop 6y ago
      I think they were being funny.
    - silicon2401 6y ago
      This is actually a great point. I have zero personal interest in pets or plants, so I'm always baffled by how people can live with animals running around at home or with plants cluttering up the home. I understand the appeal to others, I just don't relate. So for me a few pets or plants is indeed already 'many'.
    - Biganon 6y ago
      I'm pretty sure parent was being sarcastic.
AbrahamParangi 6y ago
Back when I went to high school, the tech curriculum was so rudimentary that the most knowledgeable programmers in the school were the self-taught teenage hackers. From the school's perspective their relationship with programming was adversarial, trying to prevent students from breaking into things or defacing the lab equipment. I wonder if this is still the case.
- antonzabirko 6y ago
  That's usually true even with a good curriculum...
- h2odragon 6y ago
  I wasn't allowed to take the programming class at my high school because they were afraid to let me use the AT&T 3b2 they used.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
  Of course that's still the case. Children are little shits and don't care if they cause everyone else a lot of work to undo whatever it was they thought was funny that day. I know this because I was once that kid, and the universe gave me my comeuppance when I had to be a school system IT guy dealing with kids like me.
AncoraImparo 6y ago
They should block it just based on how terrible it is. Worst editor I have ever seen.
paxys 6y ago
Which schools? And what is this online petition going to achieve?
- grlass 6y ago
  not listed, and presumably to encourage them to stop blocking sites like Repl.it
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
grawprog 6y ago
Maybe because repl.it can be used to bypass other school restrictions? A quick search trying to find anything in the news about this just brought up a bunch of threads of people teaching others to use repl.it to bypass computer restrictions. https://repl.it/talk/learn/How-To-Visit-Blocked-Sites-~-Using-Replit-TutorialJam/79171 https://repl.it/talk/learn/How-To-Visit-Blocked-Sites-~-Usin... https://repl.it/talk/learn/Bypassing-School-Restrictions/24573 https://repl.it/talk/learn/Bypassing-School-Restrictions/245... https://repl.it/talk/share/Proxy-Get-Past-School-Filters-Or-other-things/56967?order=new https://repl.it/talk/share/Proxy-Get-Past-School-Filters-Or-...
- WORMS_EAT_WORMS 6y ago
  1. This is kind of a dumb defense in my opinion. If someone is smart enough to be finding and then logging into a coding website to follow the steps here, I very much doubt little will stop them of finding other work arounds. 2. The petition seems a bit lame and without any real purpose. Sometimes all news is good news. Not saying this is that definitely -- but astroturfing into an outrage machine is great for press for a market you're trying to grow in / raise brand awareness. 3. At the very least, more coding and access in schools is a no brainer. Restricting access in general to anything is dumb. Most kids have (or will have friends) with a smart phone to see and do whatever they want.
  - grawprog 6y ago
    Personally, i agree with everything you say. I was mostly just trying to figure out why, that seemed like the likliest reason. Schools tend to be not the greatest at computer security type stuff. Just wholesale blocking the site seems like something schools would do rather than actually do something useful. My experience at least, i tended to break the restrictions on my school computers and mess around when i was bored of what they were teaching, usually because i knew it already. If they have a problem with kids doing this, maybe those kids aren't being challenged enough and are looking for their own challenge.
- amasad 6y ago
  I did not know about those. Thanks for alerting me. I deleted the posts. But if it is the case that this is the main driver then they should have reached out to us instead of blanket blocking.
nfriedly 6y ago
Back when I was in school, google.com got blocked once. They reversed that decision pretty quickly, but never did explain why they blocked it in the first place.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
  Having worked in a school system, I can imagine the explanation went something like this: Some kid finds boobs in a google image search, outrage ensues. Administrators task IT to block it. IT responds that it cannot, as sometimes boobs are available even in Google safe search. There are no 100% solutions. Administrators order IT to do something about it anyway, so IT decides to disable Google image search entirely. IT discovers that Google image search doesn't use its own domain, so they have no choice but to block all of Google. Much wailing and gnashing of teeth ensues. Administrators quickly reverse the decision to block Google. In a 4 hour meeting, IT is eventually able to explain to Administrators why what they want is not possible. Maybe.
  - nfriedly 6y ago
    Yeah, that seems entirely believable.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
EamonnMR 6y ago
Back when I was in school I was reading Practical Common Lisp online during study hall until they blocked it (I can't remember the category-might have been education.) Over the next few days they kept tweaking the filter settings and all kinds of sites (NYT, etc) where blocked. It was amusing but they did categorically block proxies so it was difficult to circumvent. Got me interested enough to read our acceptable use policy which banned the downloading of anything at all (presumably including HTML.) That wasn't the worst use of tech though. We also used a service called Turnitin which purported to find the plagiarism percentage of submitted papers. Of course it couldn't understand the difference between stealing and quoting and would flag very small sentence fragments including idioms. The fix was that we had to submit papers that where "no more than 3% plagiarized"
- lostlogin 6y ago
  Students would copy something, change a few words, check the turnitin score and change a few more. It was a good way of plagiarising and getting away with it. I didn’t plagiarise but submitted my assignments as locked PDFs which they couldn’t pass through turnitin. This met the school requirements for digital submission but I had to argue this point. The following year the rule was changed and .doc was specified.
pjfin123 6y ago
In fairness we used a similar service in high school to bypass all other filtering. I wrote a script to setup a remote desktop server on the VM they gave you and then run a web remote desktop client. Unfiltered internet unlocked!
discreditable 6y ago
I would not be surprised. A lot of my fellow schools insist on blocking the command prompt and powershell. I've tried explaining that there is nothing they can do with those tools which can't be done without them. There is a real fear amongst some schools that cmd/psh and programming tools can be used for hacking.
PragmaticPulp 6y ago
This feels more like a marketing campaign for Replit than an actual widespread problem. The Tweet is from Paul Graham, an investor in Repl.it The HN submission is from the founder of Repl.it The only evidence I could find that this was happening at all is some Tweets, which I initially read to be tongue-in-cheek rather than serious problems. Is this the case of a single IT admin blocking a website somewhere being blown up into a viral marketing campaign? This narrative that incompetent school admins are preventing brilliant students from learning how to code feels like it was written to trigger the HN crowd. How many people are now researching Repl.it because they read some Tweets that claimed it was being blocked by schools?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- asidiali 6y ago
  I was surprised to see that Amjad was the one to post this.
- jp57 6y ago
  Seems like a successful press hit: http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
- amasad 6y ago
  It is a real problem. We're trying to get to the bottom of it but the system seems vague and opaque and we have no idea who's doing the actual blocking. I do think some publicity might help us reach folks who are in charge of these school firewalls, which seems to be run by IT providers. In addition to kids posting, here is a screenshot of schools posting on Facebook groups also confused by it: https://imgur.com/a/YzFEEmp https://imgur.com/a/YzFEEmp
  - threatofrain 6y ago
    > It is a real problem. We're trying to get to the bottom of it but the system seems vague and opaque and we have no idea who's doing the actual blocking. I do think some publicity might help us reach folks who are in charge of these school firewalls, which seems to be run by IT providers. In addition to kids posting, here is a screenshot of schools posting on Facebook groups also confused by it: https://imgur.com/a/YzFEEmp https://imgur.com/a/YzFEEmp > Many schools have decided to start filtering out sites such as Replit which allows students to code in the browser. Some schools have called the site a "distraction" as kids are choosing to learn computer science and programming as opposed to working on other subjects. In this quote, which schools called your product a distraction? Why ask HN to sign a petition with no further information?
jmull 6y ago
It looks like some clever kids have figured out how to use repl.it to bypass school blockers. I guess the program instantiates a browser, makes an HTTP request and displays the result. The program runs from repl.it servers, which, of course, are not limited by the school's blocker. But the results are displayed back to the school. It looks like the technique is pretty widely known, so schools are getting wise. This is tricky from the school's perspective. Obviously repl.it is a valuable educational tool. Yet it can be abused pretty easily to do things schools can't allow.
- EamonnMR 6y ago
  Sounds like Repl.it should offer an educational version with basic filtering.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
endisneigh 6y ago
Are people against blocking replit or schools blocking things in general? If the former, but not the latter, what's so special about replit? Schools block a ton of websites. An argument could be made that schools blocking websites in general is counterproductive, however given that replit can be used to circumvent school blocks, it seems justified from the school's point of view. Unless schools are blocking every single tool that assist with coding like khan academy, I don't really see the issue.
bulletsvshumans 6y ago
Title should probably remove the editorialization "to prevent kids from coding." It's not clear that that's the intent behind the blocking.
- indymike 6y ago
  Kids can't code is the effect of the block. I don't think this is in any way editorializing. The issue with blocking general programming functionality is that it takes away educational opportunity from students. Regardless of intent, the side effect of that intent is anti-education and has no business going on in a school.
  - barnaclejive 6y ago
    Are you serious? Any reasonable read of the title sees editorializing.
woopwoop 6y ago
One of the top reasons given in the petition begins with "it's unbelievable that schools would block such a site." Well.
anonymouscaller 6y ago
IMO seems like another attempt at using a platform not for ads for ads. Replit has used the following platforms for ads that shouldn't be used for ads: - change.org - ProductHunt - HackerNews Why not use a mainstream form of ads?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
sm_javaarchive 6y ago
Lightspeed Filter has this categorized as "security.proxy" which is right. Unfortunately there's nothing stopping people from setting up a sophisticated web proxy on repl or a similar free PaaS so that would make sense. The simple solution people jump to is just completely block repl.it

37 points by amasad 6y ago

chmod600 6y ago

Why? Is there any reason to block it?

mathieuh 6y ago
Could be they overzealously blocked a load of things that could be used to cheat on exams (a REPL can be used as a calculator). Never attribute to malice etc. Not saying it’s right but I think it’s unlikely there’s some nefarious current in teaching to stop kids learning to program.
space_ghost 6y ago
From the petition[0]: "Some schools have called the site a "distraction" as kids are choosing to learn computer science and programming as opposed to working on other subjects." [0]: https://www.change.org/p/schools-of-the-world-unblock-replit-at-schools https://www.change.org/p/schools-of-the-world-unblock-replit...
- throwaway3699 6y ago
  I don't get why this is an issue. I slacked off on many boring subjects to do the same. Building software and other digital stuff helped me think like an entrepreneur, and was a hell of a lot more educational than the rest of school.
  - BitwiseFool 6y ago
    While the goal of schooling is cultivate young minds and educate them, the reality is that schools are an institution that must implement a curriculum and they expect students to do as they are told.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- chmod600 6y ago
  Is this a widespread phenomenon, or a few dumb administrators in a few places? The article doesn't give much context. In a country of 350M people, "some" schools are going to block hopscotch or using improper fractions for whatever dumb reason. Why should I care?
- weeblewobble 6y ago
  Very peculiar sentence. The word "distraction" is quoted but the rest of the sentence, the strongest claim, is not quoted. Where does the "are choosing to learn computer science and programming as opposed to working on other subjects" come from? It is implicitly attributed to "some schools", but which schools? did they really say that, or is the author paraphrasing something they said? or is it the author's interpretation or guess of their motivation? Or perhaps this is viral marketing, or in other words, BS.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
chomp 6y ago
Title is probably sensationalist. More likely that stretched IT departments at schools implement one-size-fits-all content blockers for websites and this particular site is caught up in a blocked category. I have strong doubts that schools are collaboratively targeting and blocking repl.it in particular.
- Wistar 6y ago
  My spouse is a teacher and can confirm that their IT dept uses a very broad brush in blocking things on the network. Many of the blocks are of sites that have become important teaching resources such as pinterest.
  - mytailorisrich 6y ago
    If a pupil somehow manages to access pornographic, violent, racist, whatnot content the school is going to be in trouble. The safest and simplest is to block liberally. No-one is going to be in trouble for blocking Pinterest.
    - Wistar 6y ago
      I think that an IT department should have enough wherewithal to be able to distinguish between student accessible resources and teacher accessible resources.
  - lostlogin 6y ago
    Pinterest themselves go a long way towards breaking Google. Their crappy spam prevents you getting to the actual source of an image. I can’t believe Google tolerate it.

threatofrain 6y ago

> Many schools have decided to start filtering out sites such as Replit which allows students to code in the browser. Which schools are blocking these coding sites? Why is it so hard to find on this petition?

avvt4avaw 6y ago
"Many" schools. Why do you need more information than that? It must be a lot of schools, since it says "many".
- Varriount 6y ago
  "Many" is a subjective term. It doesn't tell you anything quantifiable, merely what the describer thinks is a larger than usual number. For example, someone who has never owned pets might think that someone who owns 2 cats and a dog has "many" pets, while someone who does own pets might only consider that to be a "normal" number of pets.
  - woopwoop 6y ago
    I think they were being funny.
  - silicon2401 6y ago
    This is actually a great point. I have zero personal interest in pets or plants, so I'm always baffled by how people can live with animals running around at home or with plants cluttering up the home. I understand the appeal to others, I just don't relate. So for me a few pets or plants is indeed already 'many'.
  - Biganon 6y ago
    I'm pretty sure parent was being sarcastic.

AbrahamParangi 6y ago

Back when I went to high school, the tech curriculum was so rudimentary that the most knowledgeable programmers in the school were the self-taught teenage hackers. From the school's perspective their relationship with programming was adversarial, trying to prevent students from breaking into things or defacing the lab equipment. I wonder if this is still the case.

antonzabirko 6y ago
That's usually true even with a good curriculum...
h2odragon 6y ago
I wasn't allowed to take the programming class at my high school because they were afraid to let me use the AT&T 3b2 they used.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
Of course that's still the case. Children are little shits and don't care if they cause everyone else a lot of work to undo whatever it was they thought was funny that day. I know this because I was once that kid, and the universe gave me my comeuppance when I had to be a school system IT guy dealing with kids like me.

AncoraImparo 6y ago

They should block it just based on how terrible it is. Worst editor I have ever seen.

paxys 6y ago

Which schools? And what is this online petition going to achieve?

grlass 6y ago
not listed, and presumably to encourage them to stop blocking sites like Repl.it

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

grawprog 6y ago

Maybe because repl.it can be used to bypass other school restrictions? A quick search trying to find anything in the news about this just brought up a bunch of threads of people teaching others to use repl.it to bypass computer restrictions. https://repl.it/talk/learn/How-To-Visit-Blocked-Sites-~-Using-Replit-TutorialJam/79171 https://repl.it/talk/learn/How-To-Visit-Blocked-Sites-~-Usin... https://repl.it/talk/learn/Bypassing-School-Restrictions/24573 https://repl.it/talk/learn/Bypassing-School-Restrictions/245... https://repl.it/talk/share/Proxy-Get-Past-School-Filters-Or-other-things/56967?order=new https://repl.it/talk/share/Proxy-Get-Past-School-Filters-Or-...

WORMS_EAT_WORMS 6y ago
1. This is kind of a dumb defense in my opinion. If someone is smart enough to be finding and then logging into a coding website to follow the steps here, I very much doubt little will stop them of finding other work arounds. 2. The petition seems a bit lame and without any real purpose. Sometimes all news is good news. Not saying this is that definitely -- but astroturfing into an outrage machine is great for press for a market you're trying to grow in / raise brand awareness. 3. At the very least, more coding and access in schools is a no brainer. Restricting access in general to anything is dumb. Most kids have (or will have friends) with a smart phone to see and do whatever they want.
- grawprog 6y ago
  Personally, i agree with everything you say. I was mostly just trying to figure out why, that seemed like the likliest reason. Schools tend to be not the greatest at computer security type stuff. Just wholesale blocking the site seems like something schools would do rather than actually do something useful. My experience at least, i tended to break the restrictions on my school computers and mess around when i was bored of what they were teaching, usually because i knew it already. If they have a problem with kids doing this, maybe those kids aren't being challenged enough and are looking for their own challenge.
amasad 6y ago
I did not know about those. Thanks for alerting me. I deleted the posts. But if it is the case that this is the main driver then they should have reached out to us instead of blanket blocking.

nfriedly 6y ago

Back when I was in school, google.com got blocked once. They reversed that decision pretty quickly, but never did explain why they blocked it in the first place.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
Having worked in a school system, I can imagine the explanation went something like this: Some kid finds boobs in a google image search, outrage ensues. Administrators task IT to block it. IT responds that it cannot, as sometimes boobs are available even in Google safe search. There are no 100% solutions. Administrators order IT to do something about it anyway, so IT decides to disable Google image search entirely. IT discovers that Google image search doesn't use its own domain, so they have no choice but to block all of Google. Much wailing and gnashing of teeth ensues. Administrators quickly reverse the decision to block Google. In a 4 hour meeting, IT is eventually able to explain to Administrators why what they want is not possible. Maybe.
- nfriedly 6y ago
  Yeah, that seems entirely believable.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

EamonnMR 6y ago

Back when I was in school I was reading Practical Common Lisp online during study hall until they blocked it (I can't remember the category-might have been education.) Over the next few days they kept tweaking the filter settings and all kinds of sites (NYT, etc) where blocked. It was amusing but they did categorically block proxies so it was difficult to circumvent. Got me interested enough to read our acceptable use policy which banned the downloading of anything at all (presumably including HTML.) That wasn't the worst use of tech though. We also used a service called Turnitin which purported to find the plagiarism percentage of submitted papers. Of course it couldn't understand the difference between stealing and quoting and would flag very small sentence fragments including idioms. The fix was that we had to submit papers that where "no more than 3% plagiarized"

lostlogin 6y ago
Students would copy something, change a few words, check the turnitin score and change a few more. It was a good way of plagiarising and getting away with it. I didn’t plagiarise but submitted my assignments as locked PDFs which they couldn’t pass through turnitin. This met the school requirements for digital submission but I had to argue this point. The following year the rule was changed and .doc was specified.

pjfin123 6y ago

In fairness we used a similar service in high school to bypass all other filtering. I wrote a script to setup a remote desktop server on the VM they gave you and then run a web remote desktop client. Unfiltered internet unlocked!

discreditable 6y ago

I would not be surprised. A lot of my fellow schools insist on blocking the command prompt and powershell. I've tried explaining that there is nothing they can do with those tools which can't be done without them. There is a real fear amongst some schools that cmd/psh and programming tools can be used for hacking.

PragmaticPulp 6y ago

This feels more like a marketing campaign for Replit than an actual widespread problem. The Tweet is from Paul Graham, an investor in Repl.it The HN submission is from the founder of Repl.it The only evidence I could find that this was happening at all is some Tweets, which I initially read to be tongue-in-cheek rather than serious problems. Is this the case of a single IT admin blocking a website somewhere being blown up into a viral marketing campaign? This narrative that incompetent school admins are preventing brilliant students from learning how to code feels like it was written to trigger the HN crowd. How many people are now researching Repl.it because they read some Tweets that claimed it was being blocked by schools?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
asidiali 6y ago
I was surprised to see that Amjad was the one to post this.
jp57 6y ago
Seems like a successful press hit: http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
amasad 6y ago
It is a real problem. We're trying to get to the bottom of it but the system seems vague and opaque and we have no idea who's doing the actual blocking. I do think some publicity might help us reach folks who are in charge of these school firewalls, which seems to be run by IT providers. In addition to kids posting, here is a screenshot of schools posting on Facebook groups also confused by it: https://imgur.com/a/YzFEEmp https://imgur.com/a/YzFEEmp
- threatofrain 6y ago
  > It is a real problem. We're trying to get to the bottom of it but the system seems vague and opaque and we have no idea who's doing the actual blocking. I do think some publicity might help us reach folks who are in charge of these school firewalls, which seems to be run by IT providers. In addition to kids posting, here is a screenshot of schools posting on Facebook groups also confused by it: https://imgur.com/a/YzFEEmp https://imgur.com/a/YzFEEmp > Many schools have decided to start filtering out sites such as Replit which allows students to code in the browser. Some schools have called the site a "distraction" as kids are choosing to learn computer science and programming as opposed to working on other subjects. In this quote, which schools called your product a distraction? Why ask HN to sign a petition with no further information?

jmull 6y ago

It looks like some clever kids have figured out how to use repl.it to bypass school blockers. I guess the program instantiates a browser, makes an HTTP request and displays the result. The program runs from repl.it servers, which, of course, are not limited by the school's blocker. But the results are displayed back to the school. It looks like the technique is pretty widely known, so schools are getting wise. This is tricky from the school's perspective. Obviously repl.it is a valuable educational tool. Yet it can be abused pretty easily to do things schools can't allow.

EamonnMR 6y ago
Sounds like Repl.it should offer an educational version with basic filtering.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

endisneigh 6y ago

Are people against blocking replit or schools blocking things in general? If the former, but not the latter, what's so special about replit? Schools block a ton of websites. An argument could be made that schools blocking websites in general is counterproductive, however given that replit can be used to circumvent school blocks, it seems justified from the school's point of view. Unless schools are blocking every single tool that assist with coding like khan academy, I don't really see the issue.

bulletsvshumans 6y ago

Title should probably remove the editorialization "to prevent kids from coding." It's not clear that that's the intent behind the blocking.

indymike 6y ago
Kids can't code is the effect of the block. I don't think this is in any way editorializing. The issue with blocking general programming functionality is that it takes away educational opportunity from students. Regardless of intent, the side effect of that intent is anti-education and has no business going on in a school.
- barnaclejive 6y ago
  Are you serious? Any reasonable read of the title sees editorializing.

woopwoop 6y ago

One of the top reasons given in the petition begins with "it's unbelievable that schools would block such a site." Well.

anonymouscaller 6y ago

IMO seems like another attempt at using a platform not for ads for ads. Replit has used the following platforms for ads that shouldn't be used for ads: - change.org - ProductHunt - HackerNews Why not use a mainstream form of ads?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

sm_javaarchive 6y ago

Lightspeed Filter has this categorized as "security.proxy" which is right. Unfortunately there's nothing stopping people from setting up a sophisticated web proxy on repl or a similar free PaaS so that would make sense. The simple solution people jump to is just completely block repl.it