Websense software performs a string match against the Custom URLs exactly as they are entered. For example, if you enter http://www.yahoo.com as a recategorized Custom URL, then only if the entire URL is entered will there be a match, and the URL blocked.
Conversely, if you add just http://yahoo.com as a recategorized Custom URL, then any URL which includes "yahoo.com" in it will match and be blocked (i.e. mail.yahoo.com, games.yahoo.com, etc).
Also note, there is an implicit wild card after all re-categorized URLs. For example if you re-categorize http://www.yahoo.com then http://www.yahoo.com/additional_string/ will be re-categorized as well.
Note that many websites may host content on file servers (such as Akamai servers) and so additional URLs may need to be entered in order to block or permit a site as needed. The best way to capture this is to run testlogserver while accessing these sites which will give you visibility to any/all other sites that also need to be recategorized.
Additional Resources:
There is a difference in the entry when recategorizing https in a Limited Access Filter or custom category.
Additional Problems and Search Terms:
Allow or Block website access, Unable to recategorize a URL
Warning:
Whenever possible, avoid using Regular Expressions, as their complexity increases load on the Filtering Service.
Using regular expressions as filtering criteria typically increases CPU usage. Tests have shown that with 100 regular expressions, the average CPU usage on the Filtering Service machine increased by 20%.
Websense Technical Support policies prevent technicians from assisting customers in the creation of regular expressions. It is a legal liability to provide customers with regular expressions if they do not work as intended or causes harm to the system. Therefore, regular expressions is a feature that is provided "as is" with no direct support that is intended to enhance the filtering capabilities and is the responsibility of the customers to learn and implement regular expressions and to thoroughly test the regular expression to avoid causing undue harm to the environment as to not overblock or underblock or cause the Filtering Service to max out the CPU utilization. The information contained here are for informational purposes only, and can cause filtering issues if used inappropriately such as not knowing *exactly* what you're doing.
Adding Regex Expressions to a proxy can incurs a dramatic impact on performance. A handful or few dozen Regex Expressions can cause the proxy to fail due to excessive load. As customer's networks are not generally the same, no rule of thumb is available for using Regex expressions. Every network should be analyzed individually to ensure an overload condition does not occur.
Using regular expressions
Warning:
Avoid recategorizing sites that have been categorized as malicious sites. It is best to confirm the site has not been compromised by checking the Site Lookup tool and aceinsight.com. For more information, click here.