Blacklist & whitelist: advanced rules

This article explains the more advanced filtering methods of the blacklist & whitelist.

Alternatives

If you have many blacklist/whitelist rules, it can be handy to combine several into 1 rule. You can do this as follows: put a | symbol between the alternatives, and put brackets around the alternatives. You can often achieve the same by not choosing the full URL or domain, but the advantage of working with alternatives is that you can be specific. You then run less risk of unwanted sites also being allowed or blocked.

Examples with domains (choose the criterion Full domain to be as specific as possible):
www.oefenen.nl and images.oefenen.nl together: (www|images).oefenen.nl
oefenen.nl and www.oefenen.nl together: (www.|)oefenen.nl

Example with a URL (choose the criterion Full URL to be as specific as possible):
https://www.oefenen.nl/oefentoets/groep-6, 7 and 8 together: https://www.oefenen.nl/oefentoets/groep-(6|7|8)
https://www.oefenen.nl/oefentoets/groep-8 and www.oefenen.nl/luistertoets/ together:
https://www.oefenen.nl/(oefentoets/groep-8|luistertoets/)

Example with nested alternatives:

https://www.oefenen.nl/oefentoets/groep-6, 7, 8 and www.oefenen.nl/oefentoets/begin together:
https://www.oefenen.nl/oefentoets/(begin|groep-(6|7|8))

Good to know

With URLs you don't necessarily have to add https://. However, if you DO, the rule becomes specific. So https://www.oefenen.nl does NOT work on http://www.oefenen.nl. But www.oefenen.nl, or //www.oefenen.nl or ://www.oefenen.nl work on both http and https.
So you can also add special protocols explicitly: ftp://oefenen.nl.
Here too you can use alternatives: (ftp|http(s|))://(www.)oefenen.nl/.
Be careful: for URLs, http:// is currently NOT added automatically if the domain contains alternatives! This is on our wish list.

Updated on: 03/11/2026