Suggestion: Count whitelists only if the unblock something

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AM088
Posts: 7
Joined: Thu Nov 16, 2006 11:09 pm

Suggestion: Count whitelists only if the unblock something

Post by AM088 »

Hi

I think that currently the whitelist counter is completely useless. The fact that the "@@*.wikipedia.org/*" filter got 33356 hits only means that I encountered 33356 objects on Wikipedia since I added the filter.

I was wondering if it would be possible to make Adblock count only the whitelists that prevented a filter from blocking something? That way it would be convenient because it would let people know whether their whitelists work and whether they are needed.
helping ghost

Post by helping ghost »

Yes, it would be better, indeed.

But it has a disadvantage: whitelisted elements are not checked with the blacklist. But if you want to know if it would have been blocked, then you have to control if this element would be hit with the blacklist. This will lower the processing speed and would make Adblock Plus slower.
Wladimir Palant

Post by Wladimir Palant »

I won't do this for the reason helping ghost mentions - whitelist filters are checked first, if one of them matches we don't need to do anything else. I don't want to check all the blacklist filters if a whitelist filter already matched. And there is another problem - site whitelisting. If we whitelist the whole page, we absolutely can't tell whether something on this page would have matched the filter.

So: yes, the hit count really says how often a particular filter has been applied, not how often applying this filter actually changed something. And this isn't going to change any time soon.
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