Adult sites and EasyList - take 9000
Posted: Sat May 07, 2011 1:26 pm
Related discussion: http://forums.lanik.us/viewtopic.php?t=7121
Summary: I want to include rules for adult sites in EasyList.
Intro:
Michael and I had a very long talk (no real results, just a discussion) about this neverending topic recently. It affects one of the very clear parts of the EasyList Policy and is brought here due to the implicit commitment to discuss policy changes with contributors and to provide (considering the private nature of this forum only a little bit) more transparency and openness regarding the development of this project.
History (a.k.a. reason why this has to be even discussed and can't just be carried out):
Rick never really had any interest in covering adult sites (according to posts in this forum, he considered adding filters for them as too much work) and with fanboy offering the adult filters from his list as additional list, that fitted perfectly back then. After I was put in charge and as I personally am not a frequent visitor of such sites either, I made mistake no. 1: Although I wasn't really happy with the situation from the beginning and would have preferred to see at least a non-redundant EasyList-only supplement for adult lists, I decided to ignore the issue completely and stick with the suboptimal status quo. I just didn't think that I - the only one with write access to the list at that time - would ever be able to replace fanboy's already huge adult list and properly maintain the added rules. And most of the contributors had already installed fanboy's adult list at that time as it was recommended. Then, after Michael and Erunno joined, Erunno and I talked about starting "EasyAdult", we always wanted, but it just didn't happen (mistake no. 2). After I was... um... "n/a", Michael took over, MonztA joined and "EasyAdult" was again on the table (see related topic), but instead of following through on it, it was again abandoned which was not only mistake no. 3 but also made it a lot harder for the future as an informed decision by the main author would have to be overturned. Mistake no. 4 and 5 was giving that decision an even higher ground by putting it into the policy and the absence of anyone (me included) objecting it - until very recently.
Arguments (I'm sure I can find more or be more specific if I look through my discussion with Michael again):
Now we are here and compared to the original situation, a lot has changed: With 5 authors, all the issue reports and the millions of EasyList users, getting enough feedback to cover adult sites and to properly support the added rules is very much possible. Rick's argument that adult sites are harder to maintain isn't really accurate either, there are many sites covered by EasyList that are evidently way harder to maintain: p2p sites frequently circumvent the rules and every other day one disappears and another one gets popular, video sites regularily cause problems due to the way adservers are integrated with flash, sites using anti-adblock measures are giving us a hard time as well, etc.
I really don't think that adult sites should be treated differently from ANY other category of sites on the web. Such a thing could possibly be justified if the whole (site specific part of the) list were to be categorized according to the content, but singling out one category as not fitting the list sounds strange. A filterlist of that size (both in users and lines) should have a content neutral position, it is supposed to block ads on all English sites. Excluding certain English sites that appear in the top 500, even the top 100 most visited sites while gladly adding filters for the smallest local newspaper site doesn't make any sense to me. No other content is explicitly forbidden in the policy, not even sites that promote illegal things or might be even illegal to visit, so it's also a matter of consistency to get rid of this part of the policy.
And to be honest, I also think that it would be an advantage to be independent from fanboy. One would expect that a list with 10 million users, 5 authors and all the available user feedback should be able to just work without having to add parts of a rivaling list - so far obviously not.
Also this project is getting more mature over the time, we have rules and policies and it's not one person that determines whether it lives or dies, as the past has shown it will get along just fine with people quitting and the environment changing (i.e. syntax, but with some magic on Wladimir's side we might as well be able to tackle bigger things like maintaining or at the very least providing a useable base for the acceptable ads list). With that in mind I think the current solution considering adult sites is something from the past we are still dragging along, it could have been improved a long time ago - I'm trying to do it yet again now.
Consequences:
Rules for adult sites would be added to EasyList. For everyone using just EasyList, this would result in more ads blocked. Judging by the issue reports, a lot of people don't know that they would have to subscribe to an additional list for adult sites - which is not surprising as Adblock Plus only suggest either "EasyList (English)" or "Fanboy's list (English)", how is someone new to ABP supposed to know that one of those lists (fanboy's) provides a full package, while the other one (EasyList) excludes a certain kind of sites based on the content of their images/videos? For everyone currently using EasyList + fanboy's adult list, I personally don't know what would change, that is for fanboy to decide. If fanboy doesn't remove the list, everything would be the same (the few "For EasyList users" filters could be adapted immediately but it wouldn't make much of a difference if they weren't), it wouldn't hurt any user. Eventually, after the initial phase, the advantage would be that using EasyList and visiting adult sites doesn't require having redundant rules any more.
Methodology:
As soon as the policy is changed, the authors would start adding rules for adult sites as part of the normal workflow, so if some of them don't visit adult sites, they will obviously not add any rules for them (but I for once intend to invest some extra time to intentionally go through major adult sites to get things going). The rules would be added to separated files to make it possible to provide easylist-noadult.txt for everyone who wants to "restore the old behavior" and to honor years of EasyList history. There are no plans to integrate fanboy's adult list (except for the EasyList specific filters as mentioned).
Your opinions?
Summary: I want to include rules for adult sites in EasyList.
Intro:
Michael and I had a very long talk (no real results, just a discussion) about this neverending topic recently. It affects one of the very clear parts of the EasyList Policy and is brought here due to the implicit commitment to discuss policy changes with contributors and to provide (considering the private nature of this forum only a little bit) more transparency and openness regarding the development of this project.
History (a.k.a. reason why this has to be even discussed and can't just be carried out):
Rick never really had any interest in covering adult sites (according to posts in this forum, he considered adding filters for them as too much work) and with fanboy offering the adult filters from his list as additional list, that fitted perfectly back then. After I was put in charge and as I personally am not a frequent visitor of such sites either, I made mistake no. 1: Although I wasn't really happy with the situation from the beginning and would have preferred to see at least a non-redundant EasyList-only supplement for adult lists, I decided to ignore the issue completely and stick with the suboptimal status quo. I just didn't think that I - the only one with write access to the list at that time - would ever be able to replace fanboy's already huge adult list and properly maintain the added rules. And most of the contributors had already installed fanboy's adult list at that time as it was recommended. Then, after Michael and Erunno joined, Erunno and I talked about starting "EasyAdult", we always wanted, but it just didn't happen (mistake no. 2). After I was... um... "n/a", Michael took over, MonztA joined and "EasyAdult" was again on the table (see related topic), but instead of following through on it, it was again abandoned which was not only mistake no. 3 but also made it a lot harder for the future as an informed decision by the main author would have to be overturned. Mistake no. 4 and 5 was giving that decision an even higher ground by putting it into the policy and the absence of anyone (me included) objecting it - until very recently.
Arguments (I'm sure I can find more or be more specific if I look through my discussion with Michael again):
Now we are here and compared to the original situation, a lot has changed: With 5 authors, all the issue reports and the millions of EasyList users, getting enough feedback to cover adult sites and to properly support the added rules is very much possible. Rick's argument that adult sites are harder to maintain isn't really accurate either, there are many sites covered by EasyList that are evidently way harder to maintain: p2p sites frequently circumvent the rules and every other day one disappears and another one gets popular, video sites regularily cause problems due to the way adservers are integrated with flash, sites using anti-adblock measures are giving us a hard time as well, etc.
I really don't think that adult sites should be treated differently from ANY other category of sites on the web. Such a thing could possibly be justified if the whole (site specific part of the) list were to be categorized according to the content, but singling out one category as not fitting the list sounds strange. A filterlist of that size (both in users and lines) should have a content neutral position, it is supposed to block ads on all English sites. Excluding certain English sites that appear in the top 500, even the top 100 most visited sites while gladly adding filters for the smallest local newspaper site doesn't make any sense to me. No other content is explicitly forbidden in the policy, not even sites that promote illegal things or might be even illegal to visit, so it's also a matter of consistency to get rid of this part of the policy.
And to be honest, I also think that it would be an advantage to be independent from fanboy. One would expect that a list with 10 million users, 5 authors and all the available user feedback should be able to just work without having to add parts of a rivaling list - so far obviously not.
Also this project is getting more mature over the time, we have rules and policies and it's not one person that determines whether it lives or dies, as the past has shown it will get along just fine with people quitting and the environment changing (i.e. syntax, but with some magic on Wladimir's side we might as well be able to tackle bigger things like maintaining or at the very least providing a useable base for the acceptable ads list). With that in mind I think the current solution considering adult sites is something from the past we are still dragging along, it could have been improved a long time ago - I'm trying to do it yet again now.
Consequences:
Rules for adult sites would be added to EasyList. For everyone using just EasyList, this would result in more ads blocked. Judging by the issue reports, a lot of people don't know that they would have to subscribe to an additional list for adult sites - which is not surprising as Adblock Plus only suggest either "EasyList (English)" or "Fanboy's list (English)", how is someone new to ABP supposed to know that one of those lists (fanboy's) provides a full package, while the other one (EasyList) excludes a certain kind of sites based on the content of their images/videos? For everyone currently using EasyList + fanboy's adult list, I personally don't know what would change, that is for fanboy to decide. If fanboy doesn't remove the list, everything would be the same (the few "For EasyList users" filters could be adapted immediately but it wouldn't make much of a difference if they weren't), it wouldn't hurt any user. Eventually, after the initial phase, the advantage would be that using EasyList and visiting adult sites doesn't require having redundant rules any more.
Methodology:
As soon as the policy is changed, the authors would start adding rules for adult sites as part of the normal workflow, so if some of them don't visit adult sites, they will obviously not add any rules for them (but I for once intend to invest some extra time to intentionally go through major adult sites to get things going). The rules would be added to separated files to make it possible to provide easylist-noadult.txt for everyone who wants to "restore the old behavior" and to honor years of EasyList history. There are no plans to integrate fanboy's adult list (except for the EasyList specific filters as mentioned).
Your opinions?