About quotas

Quotas limit access to content, for example, Facebook, by a duration of time, for example, 60 minutes each day. You need to create a quota policy object in which you choose the user or user group, the duration, how often they're prompted and when the quota resets for the next day. You then need to create your filtering policy making sure that you choose the same user or user group that you applied the quota to, choose the content and for the Action, choose the "Limit to quota" option.

When a user tries to access the content that you applied the quota to, they are asked to confirm that they want to access the content, told for what duration they can view the content, the duration that remains and when their time resets.

The quota doesn't recalculate based on the amount of time used. For example, if you set to prompt the user after every ten minutes and they use five minutes, stop and start again, they lose the whole ten minutes from their quota.

The Smoothwall Filter processes quotas in order of priority. Therefore, in the Quotas table, you need to ensure that any user-specific quotas appear before any quotas for the user group that the user belongs to.

For example, Mr. Smith needs a 120-minute quota, but his Staff user group has a 60-minute quota. To make sure that he gets the correct quota, you need to place the quota that applies to Mr. Smith before the Staff quota. If you place Mr. Smith’s quota below the Staff group quota, he will only get the 60-minutes quota.

Default quota object

When you purchase Smoothwall Filter, it comes with a default quota that

The default quota object is ready for use in a web filtering policy. When used,

the default quota limits access to the relevant content to 60 minutes per 24 hours. Users are prompted every 10 minutes to confirm that they want to continue using their quota. Default quotas are reset daily at 04:00. You can edit the default quota, but you can't remove it – there must always be a default in case the quota action is used in a web filtering policy.