The Botdash editor and final websites are currently on some sort of a blacklist for Avast Security + maybe others. While it is possible to disable this for myself, others may not trust the site/editor.
A lot of anti-malware detection systems will blanket block anything that hasn’t gained enough “reputation” with them. I believe wildcard DNS (which is required for BotDash) also contributes to a poor score with these sorts of things.
Given that Avast doesn’t even have a web portal for webmasters to check their ranking and see what contributed to it, I don’t really know how we would go about “resolving” this, or frankly care to. This applies to most of the “security theater”-type site blockers.
If they’re willing to provide (for example) the URL of some malware they’ve detected or some other actual concerns, we’ll fix it, but we won’t bend to the whims of the various things that a security filter might consider suspicious. Again, a lot of these tools are basically just security theater and even the ones that generate “suggestions” are often no better than vulnerability scanners, looking for perceived misconfigurations with no real understanding of the service or it’s intended operation.
Some of these services do have nebulous “appeal” processes, but in my experience they don’t really stick until a site has a large enough user base who also use the service.
In general, you’ll be protected from actual “threats” by your browser’s JS sandbox, unless files are being downloaded, and BotDash doesn’t serve any downloadable files.
The only exception to this is zero days, and if someone has a zero day on a major browser engine, they’ll just host it on a site that’s doing everything right and has earned enough “reputation” to not be blocked. So these sorts of tools don’t really help with that.
More-often-then-not these tools are unnecessary and an inconvenience to make users feel more “secure”.
If you’re using a security tool that has false positives on small sites like this and doesn’t let you add them to an allow/ignore/safe-list, we’d suggest using a different tool.
uBlock Origin, for example, makes it extremely easy to continue on to a site that has been blocked, or disable filtering, when it causes a problem. I don’t see a similar button on the screenshots you’ve provided, although I do see an upgrade button on at least one.
The redesigned beta version of BotDash probably won’t use an iframe (since this has caused a variety of technical problems), which may resolve this, but the final architecture hasn’t been fully decided.
1 Like
Yeah, there’s an exception list. Just wasn’t sure if there’s anything you can do to fix it. Thanks!