Accepted URL formats on Enterprise Cloud Portal

Puffin Enterprise Cloud Portal supports four types of URL formats, namely, the wildcard notation * that includes all websites, domain names, hostnames, and page URLs.

Allow or block all websites

The rule ALLOW * is enabled by default. The asterisk * encompasses all websites.

Similarly, using an asterisk in a blocking rule BLOCK * blocks all websites. Refer to Approach 2: Block access to all websites and add rules to allow certain websites for how a universal blocking rule can be added.

• Note: Be careful when using an asterisk as it would affect all browsing activities throughout your organization.

Allow or block a whole domain

To include all web pages under a domain in a rule, place the wildcard notation (asterisk) * at the beginning of a domain and followed by a dot (.). E.g.:

*.example.com

*.example.com covers login.example.com, www.example.com/example, and so on.

It is not possible to use an asterisk to wildcard a different part of the domain. The following examples will not work:

• example*.com
• *example.com
• example.*

Allow or block a hostname

To include all web pages under a hostname, enter the hostname to the rule, e.g. www.example.com. www.example.com covers all pages under www.example.com, but not login.example.com or example.com.

Allow or block specific page URLs

Web filtering also supports allowing or blocking full URLs. You can allow or block certain parts of a website based specifically on the full URL. The full URL in a rule will be treated as a prefix, and all subordinate pages underneath would be covered by the rule.

URL normalization for web filtering

Puffin Web filtering conforms to several URL normalization standards. There are certain guidelines to be followed to ensure that the URLs you enter would actually be allowed or blocked. The URL normalization criteria are listed as follows.

URL Type Guidelines

Protocol Schema (both HTTP and HTTPS protocols are included; other protocols are not supported)	http://www.example.com or https://www.example.com
Username : Password (should be stripped)	user:pass@example.com → example.com
Ports (should be stripped)	example.com:8080/abc → example.com/abc
Trailing slashes (disregarded if entered)	example.com/abc/ → example.com/abc
Character case (normalized to all lower case)	EXAMPLE.cOm/abC → example.com/abc
Page anchors (the hash sign #, automatically stripped)	example.com/#info → example.com

Web filtering only supports plainly defined rules. Using regular expressions is not supported.

Quick verification of web filtering rules

Puffin Enterprise Cloud Portal provides a tool for you to quickly verify if the websites you want to allow or block are covered by the rules you have defined.

1. Scroll down to Test an URL against composed filtering rules.
2. In the field next to URL to test, enter the URL you want to check.
3. Click Test.
4. If the URL can be accessed, the result would be ALLOW. If the URL is blocked, the result would be BLOCK.

If you encounter any URLs which web filtering cannot allow or be blocked, please contact our customer service for further assistance.

Please notice that Puffin Cloud Portal is only available for Business and Enterprise subscribers.