+1

This.

If this site was ever blocked from my office network productivity would go up several hundred percent around here. So shhh, don't tell anyone.

This. But sites like WoW Insider have taught me a lot. I even learned about things like Wowpedia (WoWWiki at the time) and MMO-Champion via WoW Insider.

Honestly? I've probably learned more from websites than from playing the game itself. Playing the game shares it's own experiences but it's less important when everything can be calculated and predicted.

@Nina - with how often they change the name of the site, it probably wouldn't stay blocked for long ;)

@Nina Katarina:

You'd think so, wouldn't you? I can't get to anything directly WoW-related from work (WoW Insider, Elitist Jerks, Wowhead, Wowpedia, WoWWiki...). However, I can reach quite a few forums. And at the one I'm most active on, the longest threads in the history of the forum are the general WoW discussion ones. And guess where a lot of my posting is done? :D

Agreed, I get more value of reading stuff now...I feel like such an uber nerd when I log in. I just want to find a newbie and tutor them from everything I read...to bad that's not really possible because most people are long time players in my opinion.

@Adam

All jokes aside, I wish that was the case. Sadly our school has some BS blocking system that blocks every single site that has meta search texts (the ones that search engines uses as keywords and all that) about "game, gaming, mmo, social website, tech news(yes, tech news blocked in tech school, go figure!), proxy sites" and all that. Oddly, facebook works but not any flash games in it (maybe because teachers are in facebook too..hypocrites).

Gladly its pretty weak for someone who knows something about computers (basically it seems to be simple program to rip money off from people who think it works).
Just go to google translator and translate the site and "show original".
Bam, thats that.

You can thank me later.

@Ice

Given how simplistic yours sounds, they usually miss other methods like SSH tunneling and anonymizing proxies too, which at least once configured give you the option for uninterrupted browsing.

I've had some success just changing the IP address of the machine too - a lot of these things are only applied on specific IPs, leaving the staff/teacher machines to go their own way but are not segregated properly at the netwokring layer to prevent a simple change from circumventing the whole thing.

Major Caveat: in these ridiculous times you can get into major trouble for "hacking" even if you are doing something as simple as guessing at an unprotected path in a browser or guessing the admin password because they left it as the default (or set it to password etc.) - just because the "security" is dumb or essentially non-existent does not mean you won't get into trouble for circumventing it anyway. Common sense does not apply.

Same here, but mostly because I stopped since I got my Rogue up to 85 in January and I haven't even seen Twilight Highlands yet :( But I usually go on while I'm having lunch. I'm sure even I do end up not playing anymore, I'd still come on. Yeah, it's that good.