Why I had to ban China - fighting spam · 2010-07-26 12:54 by Wladimir Palant
I want to start with an apology to the few Chinese who are using this website for legitimate purposes — next time they try to post on the forum or comment on my blog they will most likely see an error page. Which is really a pity and I feel bad about that. But I cannot really see another way.
Redundant filter finder updated · 2010-06-11 23:56 by Wladimir Palant
I updated the tool to find useless filters, the new version uses new code from Adblock Plus and better considers filter options. Element hiding rules are left unchanged as before — I am not aware of any way to detect redundancies there. Please report any abnormalities you notice in the new version, there might still be bugs.
More roadmaps · 2010-05-19 19:17 by Wladimir Palant
The roadmap page now lists the roadmap for Element Hiding Helper and Adblock Plus Watcher extensions. There is usually little planning for these extensions but since there is some now I decided to add it to the roadmap and see how it works out.
New info page for development builds · 2010-05-06 07:52 by Wladimir Palant
Most people using development builds no longer update them manually, reading development build announcements isn’t absolutely necessary either. It was time to update the website to consider these changed circumstances — requiring people looking for a download link to open a blog post doesn’t make sense any more. Instead I created an info page that people are send to when they click on “development builds” link. I tried to keep it short yet still give all the important information (and yes, I still consider some information more important than the installation link which is why I put it first). Subscribing to the announcements is merely a recommendation now.
New "Known issues" page · 2010-04-27 10:25 by Wladimir Palant
With the “known issues” section of release changelogs growing constantly lately I felt that moving it to a separate page would serve the cause better. This will allow us to link the the issue in question directly rather than saying “look at the end of the known issues section”, also the description can be more detailed without space restrictions. I put up a first version of this page, any comments? Can you think of other common issues that should be mentioned there?
Help needed: guide for new subscription authors · 2010-03-12 14:10 by Wladimir Palant
I had to guide a few people through the process of setting up a new filter list recently, this reminded me that documentation for new subscription authors is long overdue. Unfortunately, explaining everything necessary isn’t exactly simple and I don’t have the time to write this document. Which is why I want to ask for your help. I created a Google document where I listed the points that I feel should be mentioned. Maybe there are some more points that I forgot but either way: they need to be fleshed out.
Content Security Policy enabled on adblockplus.org · 2010-03-05 11:09 by Wladimir Palant
If you are using Gecko 1.9.3 Alpha 2 (Mozilla Developer Preview) or even Firefox nightly builds then your browser already supports Content Security Policy. This is a mechanism to prevent attacks on a website like Cross-Site Scripting or Clickjacking. While I believe that adblockplus.org isn’t vulnerable to any of these attacks, I certainly like having an additional layer of protection and switched on Content Security Policy on this site. A possible side-effect is that some things which used to work fine might fail to load now — if you see something like that please let me know.
Adblock Plus roadmap · 2009-12-03 09:11 by Wladimir Palant
I understand that the decision making process around Adblock Plus hasn’t been very transparent, particularly when it comes to questions like “what will go into that release” or “when is this release done”. I decided to put up a roadmap that lists the features being considered for future releases (at least the ones where the details have been worked out enough to be implemented). I’ll try to keep this list up to date and it is open for discussion of course (preferably in the forum). Releases generally happen when all features have been implemented (or moved out to future releases) and sufficiently tested in development builds (meaning at least a week of testing). This is where the tentative release date for Adblock Plus 1.1.2 comes from — with all features being done it is going to be released at the end of the testing phase if no issues come up.
More collaboration for EasyList · 2009-12-01 13:06 by Wladimir Palant
EasyList has grown very big over the time, not only in terms of file size or user count but also in terms of effort required to keep it updated. Quoting Ares2, “the number of new topics per week has increased enormously in the last couple of months” which makes keeping up a problem. The result of the discussion: there is a public EasyList repository now. In addition to Ares2 we have Michael and Erunno with permission to push changes to the repository — they should start doing so soon. I hope that more people get involved, especially non-Europeans (somebody needs to justify “USA” that Adblock Plus still mentions in connection with EasyList ;-) ).
Adblock Plus source code documentation · 2009-11-20 07:29 by Wladimir Palant
Sometime before the release of Adblock Plus 1.0 I started adding JSDoc comments throughout Adblock Plus source code. The idea was that source code documentation will be generated from it automatically in future. This took a while but now it is finally there. This documentation is updated whenever new development builds are created. There are still issues of course, some parts that aren’t properly documented and others where the documentation could be improved. Also, for now the documentation only covers the code that runs in the namespace of the XPCOM module (AdblockPlus.js), the UI code isn’t present. This should change in future.