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appleannie1

(5,412 posts)
Sun Jan 4, 2026, 12:51 PM Sunday

When I come here now, Guardio pops up a page saying this is a malicious website

I never had that happen before in all the years I have read here almost daily. I guess learning the truth is now considered a virus and heaven forbid we say anything negative about the chief disease spreader in this country.
I overrode Guardio's warning forever, something I hated to have to do in case this site ever IS hacked. I mean it is bad enough that AI now changes what we are saying and we have to erase and redo things almost daily to write what we want to say.

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marble falls

(71,062 posts)
1. It happened to me, maybe in DU2. I closed the window, reopened it and it opened up with no problems ever since.
Sun Jan 4, 2026, 12:55 PM
Sunday

appleannie1

(5,412 posts)
2. I ignorred it for a couple days and today clicked on the override forever icon so I don't have to do it daily.
Sun Jan 4, 2026, 12:57 PM
Sunday

BootinUp

(50,950 posts)
4. Not familiar with guardio.
Sun Jan 4, 2026, 01:23 PM
Sunday

It could be that you do have some kind of malware already on your computer. You might consider trying malware bytes as an alternative short term. If malware bytes doesn’t find anything just uninstall it. Then consider whether guardio is meeting your needs.

AZJonnie

(2,790 posts)
5. These sorts of programs aren't perfect at what they do, and tend to err on the side of caution
Sun Jan 4, 2026, 01:43 PM
Sunday

They are also constantly evolving, and make changes to the algorithms that attempt to determine if a given site you're visiting is a phishing site. This means sometimes there's something that a given site (like DU) has been doing code-wise, perhaps for a long time, could suddenly be marked as "sketchy" because some new hack that hit the web leveraged similar code and the Guardio algorithm decides to take a broad, blunt force approach that ends up black-listing a lot of non-dangerous sites. I wouldn't take this particular incorrect report by the software to be one based on DU politics, though I suppose it's possible.

Also, sites run by small orgs with limited funds tend to get caught up in things like this more often than those run by big corporations with dedicated IT teams, simply because there's a LOT of updates that need to applied to the open-source code that your site is running, and programs like Guardio can detect software versions for certain client-side code (that runs in the user's browser). If you don't have staff to keep up with every update, you can start getting flagged by these sorts of detectors because you're pushing code from a older software from your site, one that's no longer considered 'safe'.

And sometimes these new security-compliant version updates aren't backwards compatible with your existing code, which means coming into proper security compliance can involve a big expense because you have to re-code a bunch of stuff, and you can be flagged by the web's various warning systems until you get your software versions up to date.

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