POPUP BLOCKERS and Hebrew College Online Tools

In order to run through the setup wizard that tests and configures your computer for Live Classroom, you must allow it to “pop open” new windows. Many of us have computer systems which run “popup blocker” programs in order to prevent web sites from opening up all those annoying windows with unsolicited advertisements. In fact, if you have a Windows XP system you almost certainly have a popup blocker running since by default the XP operating system comes with one that it turns on for you to protect you. Your Internet Service Provider, such as Verizon, also will probably have installed a popup blocker for you when you first configured your computer to use their service. Yahoo and Google also install popup blockers if you accept their “toolbars” for your browser. Thus many users have more than one popup blocker running; any one of them can veto a browser’s ability to pop open a new window, so we have to deal with all of them.

You will actually need to allow pop-up blockers on these three Hebrew College web sites.

http://hebrewcollege.blackboard.com
http://www.hebrewcollege.edu
http://208.185.32.61  (this is the Horizon Wimba site)

What this means is that you have to (1) figure out which (if any) popup blockers are running on your system, and (2) either turn them all off or force all of them to “trust” the HorizonWimba Live Classroom web site (and thus allow us to open new popup windows).

Two Sections follow:

            Disabling Pop-up Blockers

Enabling Specific Pop-up Blockers

The “Disabling Pop-up Blockers” sections includes material we copied from HorizonWimba that should help you with both (1) and (2). Note that they only explain how to totally disable popup blockers, not how to leave them enabled but force them to allow specific sites (ours!) to pop open windows, which would be a better strategy. Some popup blockers actually offer you the option of “allowing new windows” from the site that they have just blocked, which makes it easy to get the popup blocker to trust our Live Classroom site—just go there, have the popup blocker “block” us, and then accept the offer to always allow new windows from our site! The second section “Enabling Specific Pop-ups” will allow you to set the three sites to allow pop-ups but still keep blocking pop-ups from other sites.

If you choose to disable all pop-up blockers when using the three sites, remember to re-enable the pop-up blockers when done accessing the sites.

What follows is material that should help you get through this initial hurdle. Please try to work through it before you attempt to run the HorizonWimba Setup Wizard with me. (If you cannot do so, just print out the material so we can reference it more easily when we have our telephone session together.)

Are you nervous about all this? Don’t be-- the good news is that actually using Live Classroom seems to be a lot easier than setting up for it! We will get through this setup issue and find it (relatively) clear sailing afterwards.

Remember to reverse the process when done if you want pop-ups blocked for other sites.

Enabling Specific Pop-ups

Instead of globally allowing pop-up blockers, you can instead allow specific sites to have pop-ups. Some choices for doing that are listed below.

These are the 3 sites that pop-ups need to be enabled for:

http://hebrewcollege.blackboard.com
http://www.hebrewcollege.edu
http://208.185.32.61

Netscape/Mozilla Pop-Up Blocker:

1. Load http://hebrewcollege.blackboard.com.
2. In the tab label, click on . Site Controls for this site displays.
3. Click on the radio button next to “I Trust This Site” in the Trust Settings tab.
4. Click on the Advanced Tab.
5. Under Web Features, choose “Allow unrequested pop-up windows.”
6. Click Done.
7. Repeat for the other two sites listed above.

Firefox Pop-up Blocker:

1. From the Tools menu, choose Options.
2. Click on the Content icon.
3. Click on “Allowed sites” beside “Block Popup Windows.”
4. Enter each web site address and click Allow.
5. Click Close.

Google Toolbar:

1. Load http://hebrewcollege.blackboard.com.
2. Click on the button that displays how many pop-ups you have blocked. For example:

The display changes to:

3. Repeat for the other two sites listed above.

Yahoo Toolbar:

Currently the pop-up blocker is only available for Internet Explorer. If you don’t see the Pop-up icon, you don’t have it.

If you do have it, here’s how to set pop-ups for the 3 sites above.

1. Load http://hebrewcollege.blackboard.com.
2. Click the Pop-up Blocker menu.
3. Select “Always Allow Pop-Ups From…”
4. Select the site from the “Sources of Recently Blocked Pop-Ups” list.
5. Click “Allow.”
6. Repeat for the other two sites.

AOL Toolbar:

1. Click on
2. Click on “Set Pop-up Controls Preferences.”
3. Enter each web site address under “Allow  Web pop-ups from these sites.”
4. Click Add after entering each address.
5. Click Save when done.

MSN Toolbar:

1. Click on the drop-down menu for the pop-up blocker.
2. Click on Options.
3. Enter each of the three addresses above and click Add in the “Allow list.”
4. Click OK when done.

Norton Internet Security/Anti-Spam:

You cannot set individual sites to allow pop-ups. Your only choice currently is to disable pop-up blocking as described in the ‘Disable Pop-up Blocking’ section.

Clearing the Cache:

Sometimes changing a setting will not automatically fix the problem. You may need to clear the cache before the site will display properly.

To clear the cache in Internet Explorer:

1. Click Tools/Internet Options…
2. Click Delete Cookies.
3. When you see the prompt "Delete all cookies in the Temporary Internet File folder?" click OK. Click Clear History.
4. When you see the prompt "Are you sure you want Windows to delete your history of visited Web sites?" click Yes.
5. Click OK.

© All material copyright 2001–2006 Hebrew College