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How is the White-list mode (available in Parental Controls section of most routers) supposed to work? Almost all of the sites contain external links and images, JavaScript CDNs and what not, which means that simply including that main website (e.g. wikipedia.org) in the white-list should not work, because none of those dozens of external domains would be in the white-list and therefore not accessible through the router, thereby making the main page non-functional for the most part. User can't possible include all those external domains in the white-list because there are so many of them and continue changing frequently.

How do routers handle this problem? Or do they? (I haven't been able to make white-list mode work on at least two routers, while the blacklist mode work flawlessly on both routers).

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  • *wikipedia.org should include all sub domains.
    – Moab
    Commented Feb 21, 2020 at 12:42
  • External links generally do not live as a subdomain of wikipedia.org. These are mostly CDNs, external images and what not.
    – dotNET
    Commented Feb 21, 2020 at 12:55
  • Most parental controls don't work using a select blacklist (often also categorizing the content of the site). So everything that isn't on the blacklist is accessible. The whitelist would allow for access of sites that are on the blacklist. This might be dependent on your router.
    – Seth
    Commented Feb 21, 2020 at 13:07
  • @Seth: So how am I supposed to provide a list of just the websites that I want to be accessible. e.g. what if I want wikipedia and khanacademy to be accessible, but nothing else? Also note that white and black list modes were mutually exclusive on both the routers that I have used, that is, you could use one mode or the other, not both.
    – dotNET
    Commented Feb 21, 2020 at 14:20
  • You already seem to be aware why a whitelist is a lot of work. There is no shortcut to that. If you feel you have a need for the most restrictive approach you will need to include every URL/host. Indeed you will only be able to have a whitelist or a blacklist as how they work is mutually exclusive. How it's implemented is dependent on you router so you'd have to check their manual to e.g. whenever it's host names or urls and what kind of wildcards are support. Using SSL might bypass the filter depending on the technology.
    – Seth
    Commented Mar 2, 2020 at 6:18

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