Adblock Plus and (a little) more
Changes to development builds · 2011-01-08 13:03 by Wladimir Palant
Now that we need to produce development builds for Chrome the old Perl script generating development builds was getting somewhat too inflexible. It has been rewritten in Python and now I finished hooking up the new script. While it is still not generating Chrome builds (something to add early next week), there are already some changes for Firefox builds.
Comments are now automatically disabled after 6 weeks · 2010-11-24 15:42 by Wladimir Palant
For a long time the policy for this blog was: comments are always welcome. However, I noticed that there are some discussions going on in several years old blog posts that I am not really following any more. And I started thinking: what was the last time that a genuinely useful comment was received on an older blog post? I mean, a comment that wasn’t spam, off-topic, rehashing of arguments that have been mentioned years ago, something that would be better off in the forum. And I don’t remember when this happened the last time. Typically, all the useful comments arrive in the first few weeks after the article is posted and after that it’s only stuff that nobody will ever read (not even me). So: sorry, comments will now be automatically disabled on blog posts that are older than 6 weeks. If somebody stumbles upon my blog by following a random link, he/she is probably better off creating a forum post rather than commenting in the blog.
Expected server downtime · 2010-11-05 14:02 by Wladimir Palant
The server will be unreachable for some time later today. This is necessary to move adblockplus.org to a more powerful server which should hopefully resolve the connectivity issues lately. Everything should be done within 30 minutes. However, it might happen that the IP address of the server changes — in this case it will take a while until everybody can reach the server again (due to DNS caching).
New adblockplus.org website is live now · 2010-09-10 17:52 by Wladimir Palant
The new Anwiki-based adblockplus.org website is live now. As I said before, there shouldn’t be too many visible changes yet, it is mostly about switching to a more flexible technology. To log in you use the same user name and password as for the forum — however, users with less than 5 forum posts will need to be cleared by me first (sorry for the inconvenience but I don’t want to have spammers edit texts on this website). Some things still need to be polished but so far the new website appears to be running well.
New website version ready for testing · 2010-09-04 02:34 by Wladimir Palant
As many people probably noticed, the Adblock Plus website is urgently in need of some updates and rewriting. Unfortunately, making changes is too hard because the three language versions of the website need to be kept in sync. Some time ago we found Anwiki which (unlike Textpattern that is currently used) is specifically designed to handle content in multiple languages. You make the changes in one language and they automatically pop up in the other languages, marked as untranslated. And creating new translations of existing pages is trivial. And links to untranslated pages will be automatically redirected to English. Just perfect.
Why I had to ban China - fighting spam · 2010-07-26 15:54 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 · 2010-06-12 02:56 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 22:17 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 10:52 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 13:25 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?