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.

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.

Those posts were deleted by amasad (repl.it founder) just now (they explained it in another comment), but 2/3 are available on archive.org:

* https://web.archive.org/web/20210120075709/https://repl.it/t...

* https://web.archive.org/web/20210119055116/https://repl.it/t...

Those are some clever kids...

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.

How long do you think it would take for various schools IT departments (usually incredibly understaffed) to reach out to every single website where they found content that doesn't fit the school board's policies and request a take down?

How many websites would, at the request of Random School X, would remove posts just to comply? Simply so a few hundred students can use the school network rather than a phone, home computer, etc.?

This seems like a ridiculous request. From the school IT point of view, block it and move on is much more realistic.

I'm not sure deleting the posts is going to solve the problem.

There was a whole google page full of threads on this. I picked the top three results...

You can't just delete some forum posts and expect the knowledge to go away.

They'll just post it somewhere else.

I mean we're a general purpose computing platform, if we allow you to build and host a website, of course it's possible to build a proxy. It's essentially impossible to stop that. However, I doubt that's the main driver for the blocking.

Have you tried actually contacting any school boards to ask why you're being blocked?

We are on the phones since the start of the week with no avail. It sounds like there are some shadowy IT providers that are hard to reach that are doing all the blocking and locking down of machines. Someone else on this thread mentioned one such provider.

Fair enough. Honestly,.i do hope you guys can find a solution that allows students to keep using your tools. I would have loved something like that back when i was in school.

I can see why schools may not like it though, apart from just the proxy stuff, i imagine kids use repl.it a lot to do things their teachers would find unproductive.

Just thinking back to the kind of crap i would do on school computers even back in the early 2000's, i can't even imagine what kinds of things kids have come up with these days to fuck around on a computer instead of doing their work.

Like i said though, i think repl.it can be a great tool and resource for students, it seems like it may have to involve more direct effort from you guys in working with schools to make this happen though.

I just saw your comment (but I will still keep my other comment for people to see).

Basically, AFTER you get caught, you delete the evidence and leave a 404? How about edit/censor to write: "we do not condone these actions - bypassing school security, and thus we remove this harmful content"?

They're basic tutorials on how to build proxies. Some of them are pretty neat technically actually and pains me to delete them. But we also don't condone use-cases like this. If I had more time I will build the infra for taking down posts and leaving a message like you suggest.

I just tried to visit these pages (from Europe) and they are 404. "Not found error: This is not the page you're looking for. If you think this is a mistake please contact us_".

Is someone trying to hide something?

To the Replit folks: I don't know you, I have never in my life heard of Replit before (until this HN post), but I feel I won't like you. Did you actually take down these pages with evidence of bypassing school security controls just so "you got no valid reason - apart from the ones we just hid"?

Edit: "just" is 16mins after the parent posted the 3 URIs (as per HN clock).

I just deleted them because we don't condone using our tool for this use-case. Basically they're tutorials on how to use replit to build proxies. Basic stuff you can google.

So, instead of fixing the security issue, we're just going to make learning computers and programming off-limits? Silly.

What fix would you suggest?