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I work behind an really annoying firewall, and I just want the net admin to add all the SE websites to the whitelist. Right now I've lost access to Stack Overflow's authentication, but not Meta's... so I have to come here before I log in there.

It's driving me nuts. Basically I just want to add an exclusion rule for all SE domains; not only the website domains, but also the content domains such as gravatar.com, quantserve.com, the domain that holds static content, etc...

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2 Answers 2

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I'm a Community Wiki answer; please update me!

Stack Exchange sites can be found on these domains (or subdomains, e.g. *.stackexchange.com (including *.meta.stackexchange.com)):

Domain Site
askubuntu.com Ask Ubuntu
mathoverflow.net MathOverflow
serverfault.com Server Fault
stackoverflow.com Stack Overflow
stackexchange.com Stack Exchange
stackapps.com Stack Apps
superuser.com Super User

stackexchange.com includes first level domains, and second level domains: *.*.stackexchange.com

The following domains (and in most cases their subdomains) are necessary to view Stack Exchange content and participate on Stack Exchange:

Domain Purpose
ajax.googleapis.com some JavaScript (jQuery, etc.)
i.stack.imgur.com User Images
cdnjs.cloudflare.com MathJax on supported sites
*.sstatic.net static content (JavaScript, CSS, images, etc)
stacksnippets.net code snippets on Stack Overflow

These ones are required for "normal" site usage on any site. In other words, if you just want to let your employees browse and post on Stack Overflow, but not waste time at Arqade, then you'll need to include Stack Overflow and all these dependencies.

The following additional domains are required to enable additional features:

Domain Purpose
stackauth.com global login (no longer needed due to Universal Login)
gravatar.com to see user avatars of users using Gravatar
graph.facebook.com to see user avatars of users using their Facebook profile photo
*.googleusercontent.com to see user avatars of users using their Google profile photo
*.quantserve.com Site Analytics
*.google-analytics.com Site Analytics
*.scorecardresearch.com Site Analytics

Related domains, not needed for viewing/using the regular Q/A sites:

Domain Purpose
blogoverflow.com viewing archived Blog Overflow site blogs
stackmod.blog community blog
stackoverflow.blog company blog
stackoverflowbusiness.com business site
stackoverflowsolutions.com marketing purposes and swag email. Source
stackoverflowteams.com Teams
stackoverflow.help Teams help
tex-talk.net TeX and LaTeX blog
thesffblog.com science fiction and fantasy community blog

You can get a complete (and always up to date) list of Stack Exchange site URLs from the API. There are wrapper libraries in many languages for reading the API.

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  • I included grav and quant because they loaded up in the resources for the site. Mind you, so does google.
    – Incognito
    Mar 2, 2011 at 16:34
  • Neither one of them is in my NoScript whitelist and the sites all work fine, including seeing avatars. I have no idea what quantserve does, though. EDIT: and now I do know what quantserve does. Thanks, @Grace!
    – Pops
    Mar 2, 2011 at 16:35
  • 1
    You're welcome. Getting answers for people is what I'm here for. ♪
    – Grace Note StaffMod
    Mar 2, 2011 at 16:41
  • 6
    @Grace, really? I thought introducing people to the musical wonder of U+266A was what you were here for.
    – Pops
    Mar 2, 2011 at 16:45
  • 1
    wget -qO- http://stackauth.com/1.0/sites | gunzip | grep -oh \"htt.*\" | uniq > log.txt
    – Incognito
    Mar 2, 2011 at 19:42
  • Is i.stack.imgur.com non-specific enough to cover all likely cases of direct image uploading? (Joel's answer above just mentions imgur.)
    – mwfearnley
    May 28, 2016 at 16:52
  • 2
    comma seperated list of all the main domains listed above: askubuntu.com, mathoverflow.net, blogoverflow.com, serverfault.com, stackoverflow.com, stackexchange.com, stackapps.com, stackmod.blog, stackoverflow.blog, stackoverflowbusiness.com, superuser.com, tex-talk.net, thesffblog.com
    – DFSFOT
    Apr 29, 2021 at 20:55
  • It may also be worth mentioning stackoverflow.co (which is the domain that the about-the-company pages moved to). There's also stackoverflowsolutions.com, which contains guidance on the company's paid products: Teams, Collectives, Advertising, and Employer Branding. (Some folks may also have received support emails from/linking to support.stackenterprise.co?) That said, I'm not sure where/how/whether that info belongs in this post, since they're not SE site domains specifically, and aren't needed to use our Q&A sites.
    – V2Blast
    May 24, 2022 at 17:24
  • (Oh, and we also send emails related to the Q&A sites from a stackoverflow.email domain; see this MSO post for details.)
    – V2Blast
    May 24, 2022 at 17:30
  • What about www.stackexchange.live? It looks like more than the average scaper. For instance, it is very close to live update, at least for new questions on Stack Overflow: https://www.stackexchange.live/tugas-https-stackoverflow.com/questions vs. Stack Overflow's. The number of questions is even ahead of Stack Overflow's (22,984,396 questions vs. 22,979,558 questions when sampled). In fact, it seems to be a real-time mirror (with a delay on the order of less than 1 minute). Sep 10, 2022 at 13:25
  • www.stackexchange.live also has login buttons, login dialogs, the current news banner ("Register to virtually attend our inaugural conference focused on our products, with relevant content for all developers everywhere."), mirrored meta site (https://www.stackexchange.live/tugas-https-meta.stackoverflow.com/), etc. Sep 10, 2022 at 13:39
  • And this very comment here on MSE (less than 15 seconds delay)! - https://www.stackexchange.live/tugas-https-meta.stackexchange.com/a/81383 Sep 10, 2022 at 13:48
  • Looks like blogoverflow.com no longer exists
    – AJM
    Jan 30 at 19:30
  • Now connecting to stackexchange.live results in "Hmm. We’re having trouble finding that site. We can’t connect to the server at www.stackexchange.live." Apr 22 at 17:30
  • I don't think I've ever seen a request to stacksnippets.net - at the very least, it never shows up in NoScript's list of domains.
    – AJM
    Aug 9 at 15:02
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*.sstatic.net has all our static files. This is pretty much required to use the sites.

ajax.googleapis.com has JavaScript that helps the site function as expected. Pretty much required.

stackauth.com is needed for global login. Optional, but convenient if you're active on several Stack Exchange sites.

*.gravatar.com has the little icons next to people's names. Optional, but nice.

imgur.com hosts pictures that some users upload.

The other dependencies (*.quantserve.com, *.google-analytics.com) are used for our own analytics, letting us know how many visitors we get. Those are optional and the site works fine without them.

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  • How will this change if a CDN is implemented?
    – nhinkle
    May 22, 2011 at 8:25
  • 1
    @nhinkle: It won't -- we're using a subdomain of sstatic.net, so "*.sstatic.net" covers that.
    – balpha StaffMod
    May 22, 2011 at 9:00
  • 24
    I know that Joel is badass and all, but how on earth did he answer a question that was asked in 2011, back in 2010 without breaking the laws of physics? Jun 20, 2013 at 10:20
  • 4
    @OctavianDamiean - it was merged - What websites support the Stack Overflow community?
    – ChrisF Mod
    Jul 27, 2013 at 18:25
  • This answer is just what one needs if you are using one of the ?matrix type Mozilla-class browser add-ons to know what you need to allow...
    – SlySven
    Dec 12, 2022 at 2:42

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