Blocking a country is easy. Staying open is the harder, better answer. Why our name is a status code, and why every finding in our reports comes with a fix.
HTTP status code 451, “Unavailable For Legal Reasons”, was standardised in RFC 7725 in 2016. A server sends it when it won’t show a page because of a legal demand. The number is a nod to Ray Bradbury’s novel about burning books.
For adult sites, 451 has become the quiet answer to new rules. A country passes an age-check law, and the simplest technical response is to detect visitors from there and show them a block page. Some large sites have done exactly that in places where the rules changed.
We understand the appeal. A geo-block takes an afternoon. It doesn’t need a provider contract, a new sign-up flow or changes to how media is served. It moves the question from “how do we comply?” to “do we want this market?”.
And for some sites, in some countries, blocking may genuinely be the right business decision. We don’t pretend otherwise.
Blocking has costs that show up later:
Every finding in a No451 report has three parts: what we saw, with evidence; what the source in your visitors’ country says about it; and a fix. Not a vague “consider improving your age verification”, but a concrete change: the snippet that takes media out of your sitemap, the server rule that checks a signed cookie, the wording for a report page.
Where we have tested a fix ourselves, on a staging site, we say so and when. Where we haven’t, we say that too.
The checks that most often need work aren’t exotic. Media files listed in sitemaps. A link-preview image that was also a content image. Inner pages that opened directly. Each of those is a configuration change or a short snippet, not a rebuild. The bigger piece, an age check through a provider, is a contract and an integration, measured in days, not months.
That is the point of the name. A 451 says “we gave up on you”. A fix says “here is what to change”.
Fixing what we find doesn’t make a site compliant by itself. Our checks look at what a visitor meets; they don’t see your contracts, your moderation or your records. For the German closed user group, for instance, our report states openly that we don’t check the two-stage model. We describe what we saw and what the sources say, not what the law requires of you.
Take the most common finding we see: media files that open without an age check. The report shows the file list it came from, the sample of files we asked for and what the server answered. Below that sit the steps. On WordPress that means turning off image entries in the SEO plugin’s sitemaps, restricting the public media API, and adding a server rule that only hands out uploads to visitors with a signed proof of a passed check. Each step has the code, where to paste it, and how to test that it worked.
If you don’t do this yourself, there is a short message you can copy and send to your developer or agency, with the finding and the fix in it. We never send anything on your behalf.
When you have applied the fix, you run the check again. The report then shows the same row with the new result, so you can see the change, not just trust it.
Before you switch on a block, run a free scan from that country. See what a visitor there actually meets, how many findings there are and how big each fix is. Then decide. You may find that staying open is less work than you thought.
Not legal advice. This page summarises and links to primary sources; it does not tell you what the law requires of your specific site. Related: How we check a site without downloading anything · Regulations by country
One free scan shows your age check, report routes and labels, with evidence and fixes.