PeerGuardian Error Contacting URL

PeerGuardian is an IP (Internet Protocol) blocker for Windows which is highly popular in the file sharing community but also with security and privacy interested users. The software works by providing access to lists that contain IPs and IP ranges that are coming from organizations, companies, websites and individuals that invade the user’s privacy, serve ads or malicious contents.

The main application of PeerGuardian is blocking P2P traffic from sources that are known to invade the users privacy by logging the actions on P2P networks.

A user trying to update the lists or download the lists initially after downloading PeerGuardian might encounter the message “Error Contacting URL” which means that there was a connection problem between the user’s computer and the list. This is usually happening for the official lists hosted at Sourceforge.

The easiest way to overcome that error message is to find another source for that list and use that instead. PeerGuardian already provides access to the same list in the form of the level1 list on the Bluetack server. A selection of that should have the desired result.

Another option is to get the lists at the i-Blocklist website which mirrors them and provides access to several new lists that are not listed in the default PeerGuardian client.

Error Contacting URL can be a temporary error but if it is appearing continuously a user should think about switching to the alternative lists.