I’m an AP CS teacher in Los Angeles, and I’ve used Replit.com with students for 2-3 years. It’s a great tool for learning CS and it’s super convenient.
Sadly, the district blocks the site claiming it is not following certain guidelines and not approved for students. They are annoyingly conservative after the hack. I was curious who could I contact about seeing if Replit could apply or meet whatever requirements it requires so it is no longer blocked.
There are no good Contact links on the Replit.com site so I posted this message here.
You can unblock the following URLs to provide a proxy-free experience, as these modified but official versions do not allow repls to access the internet.
Replit itself can’t really do much about that (the program is abused sometimes (it happens much less due to new, stronger restrictions) for unblocking websites with web proxies) in terms of changing it’s policies because they’re already in a way where it complies to schools, and it’s enforced (at this point it’s the district not wanting to keep Replit).
Contacting your school district about unblocking/keeping firewalled replit unblocked is your best bet: firewalled replit makes it so repls can’t use the internet, which completely stops proxies, it’s unpassable. Students won’t easily find games on firewalled replit, if at all (community features/finding other repls manually is completely blocked off) but there are some bad parts, especially the fact that people do need to use external files/websites legit.
There are other alternatives if you need them:
glitch - like replit but a lot of schools simply like it because it’s not used for unblocking as much (for some reason)
codesandbox - it lets you code and stuff, not what I’d use but it’s really good for just coding.
What hack? Was Replit hacked or was your school district hacked? If your school district is worried about being hacked, using firewalledreplit.com as others have suggested is the way to go. It is official Replit but without the community features which (if I understand correctly) means that students won’t be accessing random Repls containing malware (although any Repls that do contain malware should be reported at once and Replit will take them down; they are rare AFAIK).
Yes, the district won’t unblock without Replit complying with policies that protect student information. I have found that they can use CodeSpaces in Github. But it’s more complex, but at least they can learn VS Code in process. I thought Replit would like to know they are blocked by one of the largest districts in the country.