Adblock Plus and (a little) more
New "Getting Started" page · 2008-11-25 09:41 by Wladimir Palant
I created a new documentation page called Getting Started with Adblock Plus. The idea is to provide an overview for new users with links to all the relevant information. It should replace the Tip Of The Day which never really took off. Of course, some more illustrations (or, more likely, animations) need to be added to the “Solving problems” section. I also want to add “Using Adblock Plus in Thunderbird” to “First steps” because people usually don’t understand what Adblock Plus will do in a mail client. Question is, what else should go onto that page? Suggestions?
Closing down Bugzilla? · 2008-11-12 12:16 by Wladimir Palant
I mentioned this in my MAOW presentation already — Bugzilla isn’t exactly a very useful tool when it comes to the Adblock Plus project, at least not any more. All people who want to help others hang out in the forum and I am usually the only one who looks at bug reports in Bugzilla. As the time I have available varies (and I prefer to spend it on development anyway), some questions go unanswered for quite a while. And almost all of those questions are filter issues or Firefox bugs anyway, so they don’t really need my attention. Even for the real bug reports, I’m not the only one able to request additional details from the bug reporter.
EasyList downloads moved to MozDev · 2008-10-29 14:01 by Wladimir Palant
EasyList has been doing great lately, its user base is constantly growing. The downside of this — tens of millions of download requests arriving at easylist.adblockplus.org each month, amounting to hundreds of gigabytes in traffic. And while the server can easily handle these requests, the bandwidth use of my account is dangerously approaching the limit. Yes, a merely 8 kB small file can do that to you if downloaded sufficiently often.
Adblock Plus goes Mercurial · 2008-10-23 14:58 by Wladimir Palant
After all the bigger projects already announced their move from CVS to Mercurial, it is now my turn. A Mercurial code repository for Adblock Plus was created at MozDev yesterday (thanks to Doug for the fast response), and now I am done updating the scripts and instructions on the web.
Moving to a new server · 2008-05-20 09:57 by Wladimir Palant
My issues with adblockplus.org didn’t get magically resolved. While Netdepot was able to reactivate the domain once the performance issues were resolved, they didn’t feel like overlooking my exorbitant traffic use (>120 GB on an account with 10 GB traffic limit) any more. At which point it is time to say goodbye to Netdepot who generously provided me with free hosting for the past seven years and always helped me patiently with my issues. For a project of this size, it is better not to rely on somebody’s good will any more.
Dear authors of ad blocking software · 2008-05-09 12:56 by Wladimir Palant
I know that there is lots of different ad blocking software out there, for browsers other than Firefox or even independent of any browser. Some of these programs can use the same filter subscriptions that Adblock Plus offers, and some even use EasyList and/or other Adblock Plus subscriptions by default. And I don’t see a problem with that — as long as they do it in a nice way. However, I do have a problem when bugs in those ad blocking solutions overload my server.
Status update on adblockplus.org · 2008-04-02 15:31 by Wladimir Palant
Apparently, one of the scripts used by adblockplus.org was putting considerable load on the server (actually tiny load but it was invoked every time somebody downloaded EasyList). Unfortunately, the provider didn’t communicate that to me so that I didn’t know of any load issues until the server got overloaded yesterday and the provider disabled adblockplus.org. The problem is now fixed and the server load is acceptable again. However, I will probably still have to move to a different server — NetDepot isn’t comfortable sponsoring hosting for a project of this size.
Upgraded to Textpattern 4.0.6 · 2008-03-17 23:09 by Wladimir Palant
Yet another Textpattern upgrade (yes, I am slow), and again I have to expect that it will break something. Textpattern developers don’t seem to have a concept of stable versions and change the already fragile markup module with every minor version. So if you notice something odd on this site, it is probably just broken because of this upgrade — please tell me then.
Anti-spam protection in the comments · 2007-02-05 12:22 by Wladimir Palant
A few days ago this blog was hit by the first automated comment spam attack since I installed it. I stopped the immediate attack by banning the spammer’s email address, but now I added proper anti-spam protection similar to what is used in the forum to prevent the same thing from happening again. If you notice any issues adding comments please send me a mail.
Adblock Plus internals documented · 2006-12-04 18:57 by Wladimir Palant
I finally came to extending the Adblock Plus internals section of the FAQ. So if you need an explanation about which filters are faster and why or how often Adblock Plus really downloads subscriptions — that’s where you look. It also explains how blocking of addresses or element hiding work internally and gives some tips for extension developers.