I work in a school district that is particularly aggressive with its web filtering rules.
Unsurprisingly, the reliability of my students’ network connections to replit has been awful and particularly awful in comparison to last year.
I am trying to determine if this year’s struggles is more the result of Replit’s own growing pains or my particular district’s new firewall policies.
Can anyone else out there speak to the performance of the Education account?
If Replit support is out there, are there steps I can suggest to my IT departmennt?
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Hey @GusReiber welcome to the forums!
You can give this link to your IT department on how to unblock replit https://docs.replit.com/teams-edu/it-administrators-toolkit
There is the normal site (replit.com) and a firewallsed site with all the community featured removed so its only the code editor (firewalledreplit.com).
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I have been reluctant to use the Firewall site, as I suspect it will be treated as a second-class service. Has anyone been using the Firewall site, and if so, how good is it?
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The firewalled site is the same as the normal site but with the Community feature removed, as Ethan said. Bounties also are not accessible.
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Thats a valid concern. I just took a quick look at it (I haven’t since it was first launched) and it has all the newest features so I don’t think it will be treated as such. I can ask Repit staff to confirm if you would like
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sure. But is there a difference in site performance and reliability? The firewalled site could be clustered the same way as the non-firewalled or it could be clustered for less performance and reliability.
@QwertyQwerty88 have you been using the firewalled site happily?
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Not as far as I know. I have used it a couple times just to test it out and it worked fine.
but a staff member has been pinged so hopefully he can answer that.
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$REPLIT_CLUSTER doesn’t change in firewalled repls, and the same CDN is used. In fact, some pages load faster and take less RAM because elements are stripped off
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@UMARismyname that’s good to know. I’ll give it a fresh try. You have been using it and satisfied with the site performance so far this school year, I take it?
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Is teams for education using the firewalled site? Today during a lesson in my Web Design class the teams projects became unavailable for me and all my students. I was still able to load the projects in my standard Replit account, but nothing in either of my two teams.
As a heavy use of teams for education in our classes, I can attest to performance being rather worse this year than last year… We’ve had a number of times it drop out and show replit error pages (or Cloudflare error pages).
There did seem to be a reasonable outage today though, whole class having issues accessing, with it coming back up and down again.
The other thing I would add is feature changes breaking things… Issues with automatic testing breaking, changes to the UI which broke other parts of the UI and in some limited cases inconsistent running of programs.
I’m a big fan of using replit and have been doing so for a number of years, but classrooms need stability and reliability far more than new shiny features. Classrooms aren’t fans of the move fast and break things approach…
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