Placement of whitelist filters

Discussion of EasyList subscription policy
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Erunno
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Placement of whitelist filters

Post by Erunno »

I'd like discuss the change the current practice of placing whitelist filters into the list to which the affected domain belongs. Instead I opt for putting every fix into the list where the filter is located which caused the breakage.

Arguments for the change:

1) A list should in consistent and bug-free without external dependencies. Although unlikely that this happens often, this will spare us from false positive reports for sites which have already been repaired in other lists.
2) We don't have supplemental lists for each country anyway and are fixing things broken by EasyList on non-English sites in EasyList itself already.
3) It makes it unlikely that the same whitelist filters are added to several lists which only differ in the "domain=" option.
4) it's unclear to what list country-specific whitelist filters should be added on multi-language sites.

The counter-arguments I can think of:

1) It will increase the size of the main list unnecessarily assuming users that don't use supplemental lists also don't visit sites in that language and are therefore unlikely to be affected by the breakage.
2) We'd have to communicate this to the maintainers of supplemental lists who don't use this forum.
3) We'd require additional communication overhead from said maintainers as they would have to come to this forum and report breakage instead of fixing it in their lists directly.

Discuss!
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Michael
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Post by Michael »

I would recommend that issues arising on non-English sites should be dealt with in other subscriptions created specifically for that language. The problems with not doing so are that the subscriptions would swell in size and that it would be far too difficult to deduce whether or not there really is a false positive. Although I accept that this would not be an issue on German sites, I would also question if anyone be able to effectively deal with issues on, for example, Hawaiian or Icelandic sites. Therefore I would suggest that we simply refer issues to the maintainers of subscriptions that deal with advertisements in the relevant language.
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