Content Categories Explained

The average person encounters more content in a single day than someone in 1950 would have seen in a lifetime. Most of it is fine. Some of it isn’t. And a surprisingly small amount of it is actually designed to be hard to stop looking at.

Here’s exactly what Stoix can filter and what each category actually covers, so you’re not blocking things blindly or leaving gaps you didn’t know existed.

Core Categories

Adult Content

The most commonly enabled filter, and for obvious reasons. This covers pornography and explicit material, adult dating sites, sexual wellness content when explicitly graphic, and adult entertainment broadly.

Recommended for every family device, every child of every age, workplace devices, and school networks. Blocks millions of sites. This is the baseline — everything else is layered on top.

Gambling

Online casinos, sports betting, poker platforms, cryptocurrency gambling, fantasy sports betting, and lottery sites. The category exists because access drives behavior — studies consistently show that early exposure to gambling is one of the strongest predictors of compulsive use later. This one also catches crypto gambling platforms, which often don’t look like gambling at first glance.

Worth noting: blocking this category may catch daily fantasy sports platforms depending on configuration. If that’s a legitimate use case in your household, that’s what the allowlist is for.

Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter/X, Snapchat, Reddit, Pinterest, and Discord in some configurations. For children under 13, this is a clean block. For teens, time-based restriction tends to work better than a hard block — the goal is reducing compulsive use, not creating forbidden fruit.

Chat & Messaging

Anonymous chat sites, Omegle-style video chat, dating chat rooms, and certain messaging platforms. This does not block WhatsApp, iMessage, or mainstream messaging apps — it targets the anonymous and semi-anonymous platforms where stranger contact is the product.

For young children, this is a straightforward block. For teens, review carefully — some legitimate communication tools may get caught.

Webmail

Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo Mail, and other web-based email. Realistically, this is only useful for very young children. For anyone old enough to have homework, blocking webmail creates more problems than it solves.

Entertainment

Gaming

Online gaming sites, browser games, game streaming platforms, and gaming forums. This is best used as a time-based block during homework hours rather than a permanent filter — gaming has legitimate social and cognitive value in reasonable amounts. A 14-year-old who can’t play games at all has a very motivated reason to find workarounds.

Streaming & Video

YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, Twitch, and video hosting sites broadly. For study hours and bedtime enforcement, this is one of the more practically useful blocks. YouTube also has a Restricted Mode that Stoix can enforce via Safe Search — worth considering before a full block, since it preserves access to educational content while filtering the rest.

Music Streaming

Spotify, Apple Music, SoundCloud, Pandora, and music download sites. Rarely needed as a category block — most major services have built-in explicit content filters. This one’s a niche use case.

Shopping & Commerce

Shopping & E-commerce

Amazon, eBay, online stores, marketplace sites, and classifieds. The main use case here is preventing unauthorized purchases by young children. For most families, enabling purchase protections at the account level is a better solution than blocking the entire category.

Auctions & Classifieds

eBay, Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace, and auction sites. The risk this category addresses is less about purchases and more about stranger contact — classified platforms can be vectors for unsafe meetups. May block legitimate shopping as a side effect.

Security & Privacy

Proxy & VPN Services

Web proxies, VPN providers, anonymizer services, and Tor entry nodes. This is the category that prevents filter circumvention — a motivated teen who finds out about VPNs has a working bypass to most parental control setups. Blocking this category closes that door.

The tradeoff: it also blocks legitimate VPN use. If there are adults in the household who use a VPN for work, device-level profiles handle this cleanly — different rules for different devices.

Hacking & Security

Hacking tutorials, exploit databases, dark web markets, and security tool downloads. For young children, this is a reasonable block. For anyone pursuing cybersecurity as an interest or career path, this category needs careful handling — the legitimate educational content and the harmful content live very close together on the internet.

Technical Categories

Newly Registered Domains

Domains registered less than 30 days ago. Most phishing and malware campaigns use freshly registered domains to avoid blocklists. Enabling this creates a higher false-positive rate — legitimate new businesses and startups also use new domains — so it’s better suited to high-security environments than typical family setups.

BitTorrent sites, file hosting services, and P2P file sharing platforms. Primarily useful for preventing copyright infringement and keeping young children away from unvetted downloads. May catch some cloud storage services as collateral.

Anonymizers & Translation

Language translation services, online translators, and anonymous browsing tools. Rarely recommended — Google Translate and similar tools are legitimate enough that blocking the category creates more inconvenience than protection. Only worth enabling if filter circumvention via translation tools is a specific concern.

Custom Category Creation

The standard categories cover most situations. For everything else, build your own.

How to Create Custom Lists

Go to Dashboard Blocklist
Click “Create Custom Category”
Name it (e.g., “Homework Distractions”)
Add domains to block
Enable or disable as needed

Example Custom Categories

“Homework Time”: youtube.com, netflix.com, instagram.com, tiktok.com

“Bedtime”: All entertainment sites, social media, gaming sites

“Productivity Mode”: reddit.com, twitter.com, news sites

Balancing Protection and Access

Over-filter and you’ll know immediately — constant allowlist requests, blocked educational content, legitimate activities stopped cold, and a kid who’s now very interested in how DNS filtering works. Start strict, loosen as trust builds.

Under-filter and the signals are different — inappropriate content showing up in browser history, screen time creeping up, academic performance sliding. The analytics dashboard shows patterns across devices and time, which is more useful than any individual data point.

The goal isn’t a locked room. It’s a managed environment that adjusts as the people inside it change.

Next Steps

Questions? Contact us