Adblock Plus and (a little) more

Reporting filter issues comfortably · 2010-09-25 18:35 by Wladimir Palant

Users often have problems finding the right contact address to report filter issue and when they find it they struggle getting together the necessary information. Which is why Adblock Plus 1.3a.20100924 development build comes with an issue reporter that will collect all the information and send the report automatically. You can find it in the menu of the ABP icon. The forum topic on this feature has some slightly outdated screenshots.

This feature is not complete yet:

• A number scenarios need special handling, e.g.: user didn’t add any filter subscriptions, Adblock Plus is disabled, user selected “other” as issue type. The special handling here will be added later.
• If data transmission fails Adblock Plus currently isn’t of much help. The idea is to offer sending the data in a browser window — it is more useful when dealing with SSL issues for example.
• A privacy policy needs to be written so that it can be linked to from the issue reporter.
• Subscription maintainers aren’t currently being notified. So chances are that nobody will see your report unless you post a link to it in a forum.

Other changes since the previous announcement:

• Element hiding now has a significantly lower impact on startup time. My measurements indicate that this will lower the overall startup delay for a typical Adblock Plus configuration by 10-15%.
• Default action for the ABP icon is now to open the menu — with the issue reporter opening the list of blockable items will no longer be what most users want. To change it back you can change extensions.adblockplus.defaulttoolbaraction (old value was 1).
• The add-on bar landed in Firefox 4. The new development build will use it as the default location for the ABP icon.
• Toolbar icon looks “right” in Firefox 4 now.
• Filter subscription added by other extensions will no longer persist, that extension will need to re-add the subscription on every browser start (makes sure the subscription goes away automatically if that extension is uninstalled).
• Filter subscription downloads are better distributed across the week

Installation:
https://adblockplus.org/devbuilds/adblockplus/

Tags: adblock plus development builds

Comment [1]

1. pitdicker · 2010-09-26 11:08 · #

   When I try ‘Report issue on this page’ on https://adblockplus.org/devbuilds/adblockplus/ it won’t get past the dialog ‘gathering required data’.
   It seems to work fine on some other websites.
   On locally stored webpages, the option ‘Report issue on this page’ is also displayed. Does this make sense? Will filter subscription maintainers be able to look at the source of the page?
   On a local page I also can’t get past the dialog ‘gathering required data’.
   BTW, what data is gathered?

   I hope this helps

   Reply from Wladimir Palant:

   Thank you, fixed this issue: https://hg.adblockplus.org/adblockplus/rev/97211a443025. Local pages are one of those special cases that still need to be handled.

   The data it gets is mostly the contents of the blockable items list and the screenshot (for the latter color reduction takes most time). You can see all the data on third page, click on “Show report data”.

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