False positive: venue.ink blocked for BT customers — site owner requesting recategorisation.

dfc — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 20:31:52 GMT

Hi all,

I'm the CTO and co-founder of Venue.ink, posting as the site owner rather than as a BT customer.

Over the past few weeks several of our UK users have reported that they can't reach venue.ink on BT broadband. They don't get a warning or block page — the connection just fails at the handshake. On iOS Safari it shows:

- "Safari can't open the page because it couldn't establish a secure connection to the server"
- "A TLS error caused the secure connection to fail" (NSURLErrorDomain)

Every report we've had is from a BT connection. The site works normally on other UK ISPs, on mobile networks, and everywhere else we've tested.

What the site is: booking and scheduling software for tattoo studios — appointments, calendars, client records and payments. Most of the product sits behind a login for studio staff and artists.

What we've ruled out on our side:
- SSL Labs handshake simulation passes, including for Safari and iOS clients
- Certificate chain is complete and valid
- Google Safe Browsing, VirusTotal and Sucuri all report the site clean
- No injected scripts or unauthorised changes found in our own audit

My guess is that the domain has been picked up by one of BT's filtering systems, and because we're HTTPS-only the block surfaces as a failed handshake rather than a readable warning page. I don't know whether that would be Web Threat Protect or Parental Controls — there's no interstitial for us to read a category from. I've emailed both saferbrowsing@bt.com and categorisation@bt.com and haven't had a reply yet.

Would a moderator be able to pass venue.ink to the web categorisation team to look at?

I have screenshots of the failure, and I can get DNS resolution results, IPs and timestamps from affected users — happy to send those by DM rather than post them here. I can also provide hosting details, DNS records, or a demo login if a reviewer wants to see the actual product.

Thanks,
Danilo

Re: False positive: venue.ink blocked for BT customers — site owner requesting recategorisation.

Christopher_G — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 11:54:44 GMT

Hi @dfc

Welcome to the community.

I have BT broadband, so I've tested your website and can access it with no problems. It could be that the website is currently being blocked by parental controls.

If that's the case, you've done the right thing in emailing our categorisation team. They'll review the status and change it, if they agree that it's categorised incorrectly. Please allow them 5 working days to reply. Give us a shout if/when it's been 5 working days and we'll see if we can chase it up for you.

Thanks,

Chris

This topic

False positive: venue.ink blocked for BT customers — site owner requesting recategorisation.

Re: False positive: venue.ink blocked for BT customers — site owner requesting recategorisation.