To provide schools with a safe and secure environment for learning to code, CodeHS gives teachers, administrators, and IT teams layered controls to manage how students interact with public web content. New privacy settings and moderation tools give you more options to allow or limit your students’ access to public programs and external websites.

HTML programs, including student websites created in CodeHS assignments or the CodeHS Sandbox, are now private by default. Programs that are private are only viewable by:

Private programs do not affect a student's ability to write, run, or submit HTML code in the Code Editor — the program output simply can’t be viewed by the public.

Student websites stay private unless sharing is:

To enable public HTML program sharing for students in your Section, you must turn on Public Student Websites for your Section:

When the Public Student Websites setting is enabled, students can share their HTML programs, making them publicly viewable on the internet.

You can control whether shared student HTML programs are publicly viewable or only viewable by students enrolled in your Section. To allow students to share private HTML programs with other students in your Section:

With these settings, students can share their programs with classmates, but shared programs remain inaccessible to anyone outside the Section.

If you are a verified teacher, you don’t need to enable program sharing settings for your Section to share your programs with your students. To learn how to share a program with your students, check out Sharing CodeHS Programs.

School and district administrators who prefer that all student HTML programs created by their students remain private can request to have public HTML program sharing disabled for their school or district. When public HTML program sharing is disabled at the school or district level, teachers can only choose to enable private HTML program sharing within their Sections — HTML programs cannot be shared publicly.

CodeHS also supports disabling sharing for all program types at the school or district level.

To change the privacy setting for your school or district, contact your Account Manager or email support@codehs.com.

By default, student HTML assignments and HTML Sandbox programs are hosted on the CodeHS-owned domain codehs.me. Even when CodeHS student programs are private, publicly shared programs from other CodeHS users remain viewable on codehs.me.

Schools and districts that want to prevent students from accessing all public CodeHS programs can do so with CodeHS's codehs.io domain. Programs hosted on codehs.io require a login to view and are always private — they cannot be shared publicly. By switching your school or district's HTML program hosting domain to codehs.io, you can block access to the codehs.me domain entirely on your network without affecting students' ability to complete assignments, submit work, or use the Sandbox.

To learn how to set up codehs.io at your school or district, check out Using the CodeHS.io Domain for HTML Assignments & Sandbox Programs and use the CodeHS domain testing tool to verify which domains are accessible on your network.

In addition to privacy settings that control who can view student programs, CodeHS provides moderation tools to manage program content, including the external websites a program can load or link to. Program moderation on CodeHS combines automated protections with teacher tools to keep program content safe and classroom-appropriate.

CodeHS provides program security protections that run automatically in the background for all users:

CodeHS maintains a blocklist of restricted domains and programs, including known proxy sites and game sites. If a student tries to run or save a program containing a blocked domain, the program content becomes immediately inaccessible and the student receives a warning message. Blocked programs are then reviewed by CodeHS moderators.

CodeHS automatically detects programs that attempt to act as web proxies, or URLs that reroute content to bypass school network restrictions, and flags them for teachers and CodeHS team members to review.

CodeHS moderators actively review programs that are reported or flagged by teachers, students, or automated systems and take action to enforce our Terms of Use so students remain in a safe, focused learning environment.

Teachers have several tools to control what students can access and publish within CodeHS:

Look up any CodeHS-hosted program URL to view information about the program’s author and Code Editor source. If the program was created by one of your students, you can block it immediately. If it was created by another CodeHS user, you can report it to CodeHS for review.

Track programs that you have reported to CodeHS moderators with the Reported Programs tool. Monitor the program’s moderation status at a glance, and check the program output to confirm if it has been corrected or blocked.

Instead of relying on a blocklist, you can use Whitelist Enforcement and the Student Website Allowlist to define exactly which external URLs students are permitted to include and access within their programs. When whitelist enforcement is enabled, all external requests in student programs are blocked by default.

You can then individually add approved domains to your Course or Section’s Student Website Allowlist or auto-populate the list with domains your course requires.

Administrators have the option to enforce whitelists across an entire school or district for more control over student website access.

For more about using whitelists and allowlists to manage student access to external content, check out Using Whitelist and Allowlist Tools to Manage Student Access to External Websites.

CodeHS's privacy and moderation tools support schools' CIPA compliance requirements. For details, see our Privacy Policy and CIPA Compliance Statement.