Many Church videos blocked when YouTube safety filters on

My family is having a difficulty in viewing many videos posted on LDS.org or church affiliated site. When we click on them, we receive the message "This video is unavailable in safety mode." YouTube indicates "While it's not 100 percent accurate, we use community flagging, age-restrictions, and other signals to identify and filter out inappropriate content." There doesn't appear to be anything we can do at our account or browser level to resolve this. Content is either blocked or available.

I know other families are struggling with this as well. None of us know how to resolve it. It has served as humorous material in lessons when the church video is blocked or filtered...you can imagine.

Can this be resolved by the posting admin (at LDS.org or mormon.org) setting meta to indicate "safe for all ages" or anything?

If I have missed something I can do at the browser or account level, please let me know!

stvnrowley wrote:If I have missed something I can do at the browser or account level, please let me know!

Well, at YouTube, you can log in and turn off Safe Viewing. But I would not do that. I should not have to do that to view Church videos, and it would be counter productive.

In my opinion I think the Church needs to resolve the issue from their end.

The worst part is these videos are blocked *at church. If the church is going to block youtube at its buildings then they need to stop using youtube videos on their sites. Specifically the bible videos sites. Do you know how many gospel docterine teachers try to show these videos to classes of 75+ people and never get it to work?

glarcy wrote:The worst part is these videos are blocked *at church. If the church is going to block youtube at its buildings then they need to stop using youtube videos on their sites. Specifically the bible videos sites. Do you know how many gospel docterine teachers try to show these videos to classes of 75+ people and never get it to work?

If this is truly the case, then the information passed along for a couple of years now is that you are supposed to download the videos ahead of time to play and not rely on the streaming in the meetinghouse. I'm quite surprised that if this happens as often as described, that this information is not available to you yet.

In any case, are you accessing the Bible Videos through the https://medialibrary.lds.org - That site seems to have them on lds.org and not hosted at YouTube. Maybe the issue is that we're not relying on the medialibrary site on lds.org and not the biblevideo.lds.org site which seems to link to youtube.

Confusing, I'd say, but you'll always find greatest success by 1) downloading, and 2) using the medialibrary.lds.org site.

At one time, the lds.org website was set up to detect where the request came from and route it to YouTube or another place if it came from a meeting house. I wonder if the new firewall setup with the 192.168.x.x public segment broke that.

The first thing to check at home is the Youtube safety mode. Try visiting a variety of Church videos and see what's going on, what types of videos are being blocked, and make note of those.

Check your filtering software (K9, NetNanny, etc.) if you use it, to see if you may have it set to block open image/media sources or social media. On K9 you have to unblock both to see anything at all on Youtube. K9's parent is working on a way to allow some Youtube content while blocking the bad stuff, that has proven difficult. No one has a production-ready model for filtering Youtube videos individually yet.

As to Church facilities, I would think the new DNS settings broke the routine in the responsive portion of the programming that would send you to a Church server for the video outside of Youtube.

I have another theory as to why Church videos may be blocked even though they do not have any adult content, but I know of some people who work with social media and the Church so I'll be running that by them.

I knew of someone who I was able to give this to, and they're asking what videos in particular are being affected by this problem. Give me several and I'll pass those along so they can see what it's doing.

From the lds.org right now. there is a video link:
https://www.mormonchannel.org/blog/post ... xLIDyL1-B_
That tells me the video is restricted. We are using OpenDns and Circle with Disney, but the computer I am currently using is set as unmanaged by Circle.

Check the categorization of Mormon Channel (mormonchannel.org) as some filters may call it streaming media on account of the radio stations and podcast content. It's heavy emphasis on audio/video content, and the separate URL, may have caused the categorization of that domain to be different than for lds.org or most other Church website domains