OTR wrote on 27 Oct 2016 17:53:

II was referring to sa meetings, but whatever....

How's it going OTR? Please don't wait till Pesach to update us.

I worry about my brothers in pain. It would be nice to get a postcard every once in a while.

Hola friends. I dialed back into the forum looking for some info on filters. Deciding now betwn livigent or enativ usa or gentech. Maybe a total whitelist option as I don't need internet as much as I did. 


I am reading through my old thread and it gives me a lot of perspective on myself. I guess a quick roundup of where things are for me and what I have been up to is in order. 

Porn= greatly reduced due to external siyagim such as having joined yishmoreini. That was a really important thing for me to do and I have had a few interactions with my Rav since joining that were not so pleasant due to my having looked at things I should not have. In the main  it has kept me from 'hardcore porn' and for that I am overall happy. Although I am really embarassed to see my rav due to those few screwups.. 

- life in general is more productive for me than ever. I am not spending time online as much as I was. I am invovled in more real world work which is excellent for me. 

I have  slipped up with porn occassionaly like if I have uninstalled the CE program for some reason/ changing to a new device or something like that. I slip up with masturbatio more frequently which is something I want to address this year in earnest. 

- yishmoreiney is not fullproof. You can still see things on youtube etc... And I want to get this totally out of my environment. So I have a choice. Either I totally block youtube and other file sharing sites like that (kimat impossible to do) . Or I switch to a gentech livigent or somethign like that filter which is supposed to be better which I am doing. 

- For those who are thinking - well you have to work on the 'program' and not the externals... Honestly I find working on these externals right now to have been the most helpful and quickest route to keeping me in productive cleaner living. Keeping this garbage as much out of my reach as possible is the best thing I have ever done for myself. It may not be helping me deal wiht addiction. But it is keeping the blinders on the horse inside me. And I've started developing other things that I found really helpful for me in terms of addressing my insides.

The problem I had was getting too focused on the external siyagim and not really being willing to push the button and detach. Once I did. I was happy. I started with blocking facebook (petach gehenom mamish) That was a major struggle for me. Once it was out I have not looked back. then I went to yishmoreiny and now I want to get to the next level. Maybe a whitelist, maybe a grey list I don't know but I know I definitely feel better the more I limit my internet access. 

So for my insides, Well I know a lot of guys here say they have tried it, for me, this helped. I started last year after RH learning Chovos Halevavos shaar habitachon regularly. I continued through the year and it set a baseline of stability for me. I focus(ed) a lot of the Ramban sh*ta that even if one is a rasha gamur (which I am positive I am not and niether are most of us here in this situation) he can still have bitachin in Hashem. Basically, I never understood what it meant o allow myself to feel that God loves me even if I masturbated. But He does. And that makes me want to correct myself more not less. 

Looking at this, it is like a drop in the bucket of what I am really feeling and what goes on in my mind and day.. but it is accurate. I found that I can not write everything going on with me or I wind up here all day/week month and eventually crash.

BUt if anyone has experience with any of these external options I am looking for some feedback.  

Holy guacamole! I totally forgot I ditched my smartphone also.. That was a major nisayon. Not everyone can do it probably due to how their business functions. But I made the leap and I am very happy I did. 

Welcome back

Great moves!

What about all the brothers in the group? You still keep in touch with them?

Hey nice to see you back (on track). Great to hear that you’re On The Road to a better life. KOMT!!

From my first group no one. From my second group Also no one but a little more recently I had been in contact with one of the guys. As in like months and months ago but at least a little more recently. haha. 

ok otr update.... (stardate XVJ2859784 locally known as Elul 2018). I swtiched my computer system to windows instead of mac because there are better more robust filtering options on that platform than on Mac. This was a big switch for me. That is done and I am comfortable that everything is finished on that end. I have the webchaver yoshmoreini program with the CE filtering on my comp. I am not sure if this will clash with gentech or enativ which I am deliberating whether to do gentech or entativ. Not sure which. Spoke with tag about it last week but did not get clear from them at the time the comparison between the capabilities of each system. I guess that is another thing on my list for tomorrow. (hopefully). I am a little hesitating because I know that switching to either of these is going to close off a tiny door that is still left open on my comp even with the CE/yishmoreini program. Youtube needs to go out the window.. (or  perhaps Windows as it were lol) and that has been a present battleground for me.  I will also have to get rid of Amazon prime. Or at least being the main member and instead I will need to be a friends and family member because the main member always has access to teh movies which although not porn, are not clean, and not something I want on my computer. 

I am hoping that the level of filtering will be what I anticipate it is when I put the new program on (whichever one I do). If it is just another dud I'll be really po'd (and I do not mean purchase ordered) 

I did Gentech and Nativ. A little background- if I get a new filter, I automatically try to get around it. I did some of it with the Tag guy on the phone.

Nativ seems to be much stronger, but it makes things harder. If you’re willing to be involved and call up and tweak it as you use it, you should be able to use Nativ very comfortably. 

TOtal side note: 

I am getting to the shidduch age- not for me but for my kids. I am thinking very much about how I would deal with the internet issue in a prospective shidduch. If a boy or girl has a phone with internet in my book I would see that as a deal breaker for the shidduch. Unles they were working. In that case, the question is how they are filtered. If tehy are not filtered, it's a nogo for me. 

But what about the house where the kid grew up. If there was internet in the house and there was no filter, I don't see how I could let my kid go out either. Is that crazy? Is that right? 

Of course this is not giving others the opportunity to grow into it as I needed to. I had unfiltered internet for a long time. I had internet without my wife even knowing we had internet at some points!!  Should I be more meikil on others then? 

But then again, 10 years ago, there a lot less talk about this stuff and less clearly defined. 

OTR wrote on 20 Aug 2018 03:45:

Please ask a rav about this issue.

It is very sad how many bochurim that I speak with fall at home because their parents naively don't believe what can be done with unfiltered computers. The pain of a boy who has kept himself clean for extended periods of time and then falls on a weekend off from yeshiva, it makes us cry. A couple getting married should definitely be mekabel to keep their homes as safe as humanly possible - without rationalizations. As far as who to take a a prospective son/daughter in law, as with all other shidduch related issues, daven a lot, do your homework, and consult with your rav.

JUst caught a news tidbit about Ben Affleck being back in rehab. I didn't actuallly know he was in rehab before. But it is amazing to me that these celebs who look like they have it all are really so empty and miserable sometimes.

yup. going to definitely speak with daas torah on the parsha. 

Turns out that Nativ is the best program for me. So I ahve installed it and chosen the whitelist option.
. However I thought it could work together with CE but it cant which means my monitoring is now gone. That was a huge deterent for me . Right now I am reaching out to some guys from my old grous to see  if one of them can be my filter guardian but feeling a little lost without the CE program which was reported to my Rav. that program has totally molded my way of thinking and epreincing my computer use for a while

You can make a webchaver