Content Filtering YouTube videos for the familysearch.org site

When trying to teach about family history in the church buildings, you cannot use the YouTube videos as part of that training and show it to the class members.

Either an exception for the videos be made in the content filtering firewall or the vidoes need to be placed onto a site that is not blocked.

All YouTube videos that the church puts onto YouTube should be viewable from within the church buildings in my optinion.

Most can be found elsewhere on the Church website and FamilySearch via the Brightcove player. Admittedly though they can be a little hard to find.

However, I have found a small group of 'Getting Started' videos that is not on either of those, and is also linked to from the familysearch.org/serve site (old Consultant portal renamed and repurposed slightly). Have tried to get FamilySearch to fix that one by first getting them onto FamilySearch or elsewhere on the Church websites and second, getting the link fixed on the consultant page so it goes to a page on either website where those same videos might be available.

Carded a bogey on both cases, nothing ever got fixed regarding that subset of videos.

Good luck I understand both sides of the issue and say Pray always, because of how much it slows down the net, and its poor Contents that needs to be blocked, and the way Current filter are Designed, I hope the best, some proxies allow you to unblock YouTube, but I don't know if the Church allows them or blocks them. Meaning changing the Proxy Settings, or also use a web based Proxy too, but I would not do those, because of how they would get mad at you. So in other words here is my opinion. In my opinion they need to come up with better filter softer that blocks many ways, and allows certain links, and clean whole some things, instead of blocking the whole domain.

Truthfully it wouldn't be hard to create a mask filter for the lds channels on youtube for viewing in the church buildings so that it's a win situation all around, but I am unsure how it is currently setup, but it shouldn't be that hard to do. I also know a few other good youtube videos for business classes and training are blocked by the filter as well. Some method of allowing a locality to whitelist videos at some levels would be rather helpful in achieving that end of things. It could prove beneficial to training classes for the employment specialists as well.

If you have a mobile device such as an iPhone, Samsung Galaxy, iPad, or Android tablet you can access and even pre-download the Family History videos onto your device and then connect it to a television with a cord such as an HDMI cord.

Maybe it's because we have a FHC at our stake center, but this past week I noticed that YouTube wasn't filtered, but the connection passed the filter check.

Youtube is currently not blocked, BUT the church is monitoring how it is being used and may re-block it in the near future if its not being used to spread the gospel.

I guess it depends on where you are if youtube.com is filtered or not. We are in the Ventura California Stake (Fillmore Ward) and it is blocked for us. We do have a Family History Center in our building and it is a point of frustration for our FH consultants that want to use the church's videos on youtube to teach about family history.

After reading through the responses, I asked one of our FH consultants to search through non-filtered sites to see if there is a link to the videos that she wants to use.

rolandc wrote:Youtube is currently not blocked, BUT the church is monitoring how it is being used and may re-block it in the near future if its not being used to spread the gospel.

That topic came up with a tech while I was checking on something else. Apparently the YouTube filter was disabled only temporary around the time of General Conference.

Since FHCs are going on a separate network segment, perhaps they'll consider opening up to YouTube for FHCs while still restricting the APs that most members use.

I will check ours again this weekend.

russellhltn wrote:

rolandc wrote:Youtube is currently not blocked, BUT the church is monitoring how it is being used and may re-block it in the near future if its not being used to spread the gospel.

That topic came up with a tech while I was checking on something else. Apparently the YouTube filter was disabled only temporary around the time of General Conference.

Since FHCs are going on a separate network segment, perhaps they'll consider opening up to YouTube for FHCs while still restricting the APs that most members use.

Purely by chance during the week, we noticed that the FHC is able to access YouTube.

The FHC computers are all hard wired to the network setup under the new firewall configuration. The majority of the Public Network uses WAP. The Clerk computers are hard wired to the same network. Neither can connect to YouTube.