I've Unblocked a Category or Site, but it's STILL Being Blocked!

Occasionally, you might be confused because you've UNBLOCKED a category (or website) in your FreeFiltering settings, but the website or service is STILL being blocked. Why is this? And how can you fix it?

Your browser (Chrome, Edge, FireFox, etc) keeps a "cache" or short-term memory of the DNS requests you've recently made in order to "save time" the next time you make the same DNS request. This sometimes creates a problem for you. Here's an example:

Suppose you've just enabled "YouTube Strict" mode for your "Main Profile" that is enforced from your router by using our "Standard DNS Servers". You child complains that videos from their favorite YouTube channel (Dude Perfect), which you've previously approved for them to watch, will not load now. They might see a message like this:

You log in to your FreeFiltering account and switch from "YouTube Strict" to "YouTube Moderate", thinking this might fix the issue of a particular video not loading. However, when you try to load the same video again, you get a similar result. Why? When your account was set to "YouTube Strict" mode, we were enforcing the subdomain "restrict.youtube.com" for any request you made for YouTube.com. But now that you've changed to "YouTube Moderate", we're enforcing "restrictmoderate.youtube.com" instead.

However, your browser, since it uses a "cache" to save time, is not making a new DNS request each time you access YouTube. It is relying on its internal cache to save time, but by doing this, your browser is relying on the OLD dns setting ("restrict.youtube.com") instead of the new setting you've enabled ("restrictmoderate.youtube.com").

How do you fix this? You need to clear your browser's DNS cache, then reload the YouTube page. Here are instructions for clearing your DNS cache.