Hacker News Reader

Comment by MDCore | Hacker News Reader

What the title nor the github account are up front about is that this is an ad/privacy blocker that comes with a rather large blacklist[1]. I tried disabling it (because, like the title, I only wanted to block a single thing) but it wouldn't let me work around the blacklist.

Perhaps be more up front that this is an adblocker.

[1]: This is just one of the blacklists: https://github.com/gorhill/httpswitchboard/blob/a325083df02b...

View on HN

You could fork it, get rid of the black lists and publish it on the Chrome web store.

It is licensed under the GPL, which was created for this very use case.

I suppose I could if I wanted to go to that very large amount of effort just to get that small amount of functionality. Methinks a userscript would be a lot easier.

I'd agree with your comment if I'd said "They should take the blacklist out." Instead I wrote that the title and github project are not up front about a core piece of functionality of the plugin.

Userscripts wait for the DOM to finish loading, though, no? Thus defeating the purpose of saving bandwidth?

They run at either "document-start", "document-end" or "document-idle". "document-start" is as soon as possible.

All it takes is a one-time developer registration fee of US$5.00 to verify your account and publish.

Didn't cost me anything to publish to the Chrome store.

"Allow users to disable/enable preset blacklists" https://github.com/gorhill/httpswitchboard/issues/78

This was on my todo list, but there, I formalized it.

Fixed: https://github.com/gorhill/httpswitchboard/issues/78

> "the title nor the github account are up front about is that this is an ad/privacy blocker that comes with a rather large blacklist"

This has been there for two months:

https://github.com/gorhill/httpswitchboard/wiki/Quick-tour-%...

"Thanks to these preset blacklists maintained by good spirited people, nothing from these locations could make it to the browser"

The slide is a bit dated though, as you can graylist or whitelist a preset blacklist entry, which was not possible back then.

Ah. That is pretty obscure though! I can't even see how to get to the tour from the main page... Oh I see now, the Wiki link on the side.

It's a good project and I love your UI. I'm not trying to criticise negatively, just point out that I was surprised by one of the major features, and perhaps others would be too.

Fair enough. Yesterday night I also added the following in the first paragraph of the README file (and detailed description in Chrome store): "As of December 2013, the extension comes with preset blacklists totalling over 45,000 distinct hostnames."

I don't think I agree with your characterisation of the extension. It's a switchboard that happens to have predefined blacklists focused on ad/privacy, not an adblocker. AdBlockPlus doesn't let me do what this tool does, nor does Ghostery.

I do think one should be able to ditch/modify the blacklists though, without forking the repo.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com