VF wrote:It'd be great to have more people contributing, especially to the element filter, which is obviously more complicated and intricate than a normal filter list.
I could see how it would seem so, now that filterlists only contain a few small regexps, but here's some quick background on my history...
I was an active daily lurker and occasional poster of the adblock plus situation when Fx 1.5 was set to come out, in the weeks surrounding the controversy involving rue, mcm and wlad when no official ab version would be ready for the browser release, and wlad's initial version. In fact, I believe I offered my "endorsement" of his version before Mike gave the official word, but after rue started the conspiracy theorist afoot. Keep in mind this was before Wlad worked his magic and laid down the final word on the simple vs. regexp debate.
I'd look at some of those full screen-width regexp's and my brain would fart, and that's about as interested as I could get. Once I got interested in Stylish during it's earlier days, the glory of css element selection was clear. No more trying to figure out streams of seemingly meaningless code, all I had to do was learn some css, bookmark a few good resources, and figure out how to dissect a webpage in the DOMi. And the difference in "power" is easy to see, with ad blocking being just the start of the redesign of my web surfing. Where my time would be the most personally benefiting was apparent, and maybe something I could do would be of some value to others, through the userstyles site.
VF wrote:I found that I was writing a lot of personal little element blocking filters for adblock plus when 0.7 came out. The only problem was it was pretty inefficient to edit every site I came across for myself, so I posted on the adblock plus forum about the feasibility of an element filter list, Rick responded that he was going to start one, and here we are.
Kudos for taking the initiative, and thanks for helping to birth this particular effort to take back the web for the user.
VF wrote:Stylish and its ilk obviously give you a more fine-grained control over websites, but involve manually finding styles for each site you want.
I said "RIP and it's ilk", for a very good reason.
I probably should have been more specific: RIP, Platypus, and Aardvark, in my personal experience, but there's others. More background required...
I seem to read a lot of the tech articles on infoworld.com, and there was a flash ad that, although blocked and whitespace collapsed in adblock, would still massively disturb the layout of the content. RIP pulled it out easily, on the article it was set up to fix.. but other articles and the main site itself was virtually impossible to redesign with RIP... so I tried Aardvark and Platypus, neither was much better. Then came stylish...
And now I've come full circle, what I've learned about css from my Stylish efforts should be of some value back here with Wlad (thankfully!!!) now in command. Thankfully as well, there should be little or no conflicts between the two and they compliment each other perfectly. I've always tried to include complete ad element blocking (I know, actually hiding) when I post a style for a site, but only to ensure that it doesn't have any dependencies. Element hiding in abp with the EasyElement list replaces RIP and it's ilk, but it's overlap with Stylish is very minimal.
VF wrote:An auto-updating filter list that users don't even have to think about is much better, I think.
Totally agree on the issue of straight adblocking, of course, although there is a small community of authors that are attempting to produce an effective global adblock project completely in css, with good success. Stylish is for the power uswer and above to fully tweak his or her experience in a similar way to Greasemonkey, whereas abp +Easylist + EasyElement is the perfect solution for "set it and forgot it" situations.
/rant - sorry for the length, but I have a personal tick when Stylish gets grouped in with the others.
VF wrote:Anonymous - (rtk) wrote:
I've been working on the full site for
http://userstyles.org/style/show/564, so I was very interested to see how the abp7.1 + easylist + easyelement would fair on the homepage. I'm not going to learn the format this morning, but these two could be added to your list:
#ad_left and #ad_tiles
Those look good. (Rick: washingtonpost.com#div(id^=ad_) )
I'll debate their potential for false positives as global filters in the private forum, as I understand completely the difference between the obvious need for the list to be publicly viewable, while keeping the logic behind the list close to the chest. Heck, I didn't even want to post the site name here, preferring that whoever was reading it would have to go look it up.
VF wrote:Obviously there's a lot of stuff we haven't gotten to yet, considering it's mostly just us 3-4 people against the web as a whole, and this has only existed for a few months.
Please know that my posts were in no way meant to make anyone feel like I was slighting the project because it didn't catch these two ads. I posted them here simply in an attempt to showcase that I might be capable of assisting in the project.
It'll never be finished, that's for sure. If we can claim that it catches better than 60% of the ads while causing least than 5% false positives, it'd be doing about as good as it possibly could.
