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This page allows you to enter the addresses of websites you always want to block or always want to allow. The system allows you to be very general or very specific about what you want to block or allow. You are in control at all times.

To add a website to either list, simply type its address into the small window just below the relevant list and click the [Add to block/allow list] button. Please make sure you are online when you do this (you'll see why in a minute). The address will then appear in the window above, although you will notice it isn't quite in the form you typed it in. Two things are going on here:

  1. ICRAplus supports wildcards (*). The term wildcard simply means that the asterisk (*) can be used to mean any other character or group of characters.

    Many website addresses begin with "http://", sometimes though, you'll see "https://", especially on sites that take credit cards, and occasionally you may see "ftp://" or other combinations. This is known as the scheme - and you don't have to include it. If you don't include the scheme then the filter will just write in *:// at the beginning of the web address. That means that whatever the scheme may be, the filter will block or allow it as appropriate.

    For example, if you enter www.badsite.com and add it to your block list, the filter will actually write *://www.badsite.com/* into the list (we'll come to the final * in the "more on wildcards" section). This means that whether the site begins with http://, https:// or whatever else, the site will be blocked. This is probably what you want to do.

    If you know that you definitely only want to block or allow, say, https://www.website.com, then you can include the scheme - it's up to you.

  2. The web addresses you type in, such as icra.org are only part of the story. Every web address has a numerical equivalent known as an IP address. Furthermore, many websites have several aliases. For block list entries, the filter attempts to find these aliases and IP addresses and adds them all to your list.

    As the filter needs to fetch the alternative addresses for the sites you enter, you must be online when adding entries to your block list.

    The filter will not look up alternatives for addresses that include wildcards (since there is no exact match to make).

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