Bing.com blocked in school - Sketch up pro 2024 not working

SketchUp Pro
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1

We have bing is blocked in our school due to safegaurding reasons because it’s safe search feature does not function as it should.

Because of this the users for SketchUp pro 2024 are unable to sign in when connected to our network as sketch up looks for bing.com to check for internet activity.

We can tried editing the PrivatePreferences.json file and it does seem to work however, these are BYOD users and we will have to manually do this annoying fix for multiple users and the fix isn’t as simple as it was for version 22.

Are sketchup ever going to look to fix this issue ?

We had this same issue in sketch 2022 as well and plenty of schools have had this issue.

Can we not change it to go to sketchup.com or google instead of bing?

Multiple school admins that I have spoken to has had this issue.

3

You can change the value like have before, by editing the PrivatePreferences.json file. I don’t think SketchUp itself is going to change away from bing.com any time soon.

For Windows users, it would be possible to make a bat file, that does the editing when the student double-clicks on the file you sent to them. You also could let them know how to edit the file themselves before they even come to the class.

I don’t think the way it works has changed since 2019.2.

4

Thank you for response Colin.

My question is a lot of eduction sectors block bing & SketchUp is used by a lot of education sectors.

Surely the devs can make this simple change for education sectors and make our lives so much easier. :roll_eyes:

All that does, to my knowledge is that it goes to bing.com to check the internet connectivity.

Surely, that shouldn’t be a massive ask!

If you look at the forums from all these years, you will see many many many users facing this issue.

And by your own admission, since version 2019 this has been an issue.

Can we not put a request to the devs to look into this?

Thank you.

5

The change in 2019.2 was to stop using google.com, because that was blocked in all of China.

What ought to be possible is to make it be a preference setting in SketchUp, so people don’t have to know how to get to the %LodalAppData% folders. I will ask if that can be done.

1 Like
6

I made a features request, SU-57970 in our system, with the subject of: “can the online check URL be a preference setting?”

1 Like
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Thank you so much for rasing a feature request with the team. Appreciate your help.

We have managed to find a way around for the Mac users at the moment for Sketch up pro 2024 however, we are still struggling with the windows users.

Is it possible to provide the Bat file that you mentioned above ?

We can edit the privatepreferences.json file and add the URL there but when the app opens, it seems to replace the file completely.

How can we stop this from happening ?

Please advise.

8

The file is replaced when SketchUp closes. You would want to modify PrivatePreferences.json while SketchUp is closed.

There isn’t an existing bat file for this.

9

Here’s what @SketchUp3D_de suggested: