Adblock Plus and (a little) more
Help needed: guide for new subscription authors · 2010-03-12 16:10 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 13:09 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 11:11 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 15:06 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 09:29 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.
Mercurial over HTTPS - ouch, SSL isn't always secure · 2009-11-18 08:43 by Wladimir Palant
I set up my Mercurial server as HTTPS only. The idea behind it was that establishing a secure communication channel outweighs the disadvantages (server load, more traffic and somewhat slower pull operations) for a small server like that. But then I had second thoughts — I am using a StartCom certificate that isn’t yet accepted everywhere, what if somebody cannot pull the repository because of that?
Moving Adblock Plus source code · 2009-11-16 17:49 by Wladimir Palant
Almost four years ago, Adblock Plus started out as a project hosted on MozDev.org. It quickly outgrew this hosting and moved to its own domain, yet some parts of it remained on MozDev — including source code. That’s until now. I finally made the decision to host my source code myself, having five extensions, downloads and web content in a single repository was simply too much of a mess. After some waving with hg convert and a little manual help I am proudly presenting you hg.adblockplus.org.
adblockplus.org - now with SSL protection · 2009-06-26 13:47 by Wladimir Palant
I enabled SSL on adblockplus.org and easylist.adblockplus.org so that these can be accessed via a secure connection. I also checked that all pages keep you on an encrypted connection once you are there (if you get redirected from HTTPS to plain HTTP somewhere — let me know). Only known problem is the video on the main page (embedding YouTube via SSL doesn’t seem possible) and images in forum posts (these typically come from plain HTTP as well). Oh, and I am using a StartCom certificate which means that only Gecko-based browsers and Safari will recognize it (given the audience of this site, this shouldn’t be a problem).
EasyList downloads back on easylist.adblockplus.org - most of the time · 2009-02-27 02:21 by Wladimir Palant
A few months ago I decided to move EasyList downloads to MozDev. However, my bandwidth limit increased greatly since then and I can handle the traffic myself now. So taking the load away from MozDev’s server that surely has better things to do seems to be a good idea. Also, downloads get more reliable again because they don’t depend on two servers. For now I let easylist.adblockplus.org serve 80% of the requests while remaining 20% are still being redirected to MozDev. I want to see how that goes, might change the proportions again later.
Microsoft joining the ranks of referrer spammers? · 2008-12-19 08:52 by Wladimir Palant
I just noticed an unusually high amount of requests in my logs with referrer being Live Search, all with the same search request. Now that doesn’t make sense because I usually get very few people from there, about 0.5% of the requests referred by Google. And I just don’t believe that everybody suddenly decided to search for “adblockplus”. Finally, all requests came in for http://adblockplus.org/ and were redirected to http://adblockplus.org/en/ — but Live Search doesn’t even list the main page, it links directly the the English one (or German, or French, depending on your location).