At PBworks, we understand that content filters on internet connections are necessary for businesses and educational institutions to keep networks safe and to keep children from viewing objectionable material.  However, sometimes these filters can interfere with legitimate use of PBworks.  Here are some technical details of our service, so that you can tweak the settings of your content filters to allow uninterrupted usage of PBworks.

Subdomains 

Your Workspace

Each time a workspace is made on PBworks.com, a separate subdomain of our main site is created.  If a workspace is named "demosite," the complete address for the site is demosite.pbworks.com. 

Other Subdomains

PBworks pulls CSS and Javascript files from other servers on a couple of other subdomains.  Here's a list of sites that your users need to be able to access in order to completely use PBworks: 

• vs1.pbworks.com
• vs2.pbworks.com
• files.pbworks.com
• www.pbworks.com
• my.pbworks.com
• the URL of any workspace they have created 

Also, if the users would like to upload videos, they can embed them via YouTube or some other video sharing service or they can use our own video uploader.  If they use the video uploader built in to PBworks, then they will also need access to www.fliqz.com.  Fliqz.com provides hosting for PBworks videos.  It's a bit different than YouTube, because there is no public URL that a video is hosted on.  The videos can only be seen while embedded in a PBworks page.

Custom Domains

Custom domains are no longer offered in the educational edition of PBworks.  Sites that have custom domains can keep them, but if any problems occur with a custom domain they will either need to be removed from the site, or cleared by the domain name registrar (the service used to register the domain).  PBworks is not a domain name registrar and you cannot purchase a custom domain for your site through PBworks.

IP addresses

Your network may be inadvertently blocking PBworks by IP address, which can block key functions, like editing, changing settings, and email delivery.  Here are the IP addresses that PBworks uses and should be unblocked.  The last four IP addresses are for email delivery, so these should be allowed to deliver email to your users:

In the free and educational services, notification emails are sent with this email address: notification@pbworks.com

Browsers 

Supported Browsers

PBworks performs great on most common and popular web browsers.  Support Internet Explorer 6 was dropped in November of 2010.  We officially support the use of the following browsers:

• Internet Explorer 8 (for Windows XP users only, users of Vista, Windows 7 and 8 should update immediately to later versions of IE)
• Internet Explorer 9
• Internet Explorer 10
• Firefox (latest version)
• Safari (latest version)
• Google Chrome (latest version)
  
  

If you experience difficulty with your workspace, please try clearing the cache of the browser, contacting your local network administrator (the people responsible for the maintenance of your computers), or accessing the workspace in another browser. This will help our support team narrow down any possible issues.  Please note, that even with a Classroom or Campus Edition upgrade, PBworks needs cooperation from local network administrators in order to function well, and PBworks support is not a replacement for your school's internal IT organization.  If a problem cannot be generally reproduced or only exists for one computer or location, we will not be able to address it.

Browser Versions

Browsers that come with operating systems (like Internet Explorer and Safari) are usually updated via the automatic updates, but you may want to check your browser version (often you can find out which version you're using by clicking on "Help" > "About ..." in your browser' menu). Using the latest full-version (non-beta) of a browser increases your success while using PBworks. When possible, please contact support with the browser version you are using.