InformAction Forums

It may be good idea to implement hit counting, it could serve to help manual purging maintenance
of possibly growing white/untrusted list.

P.S.that anti s-p_a*m filter is over reactive.

I have never seen such a dumb filter.
Every post with common polite words is trial and error.
The OP was rewritten 5 times and finally cut to one third...

I am not sure exactly what you mean by "hit counting" -- counting hits of what? Or of exactly what feature you would like.

There is no need to purge your Untrusted list. If you wish to re-allow a site marked Untrusted, simply point to Untrusted in the NoScript menu, then click to allow or temporarily allow the site in the Untrusted sub-menu. This removes it from your Untrusted list. "Unneeded" entries do no harm.

The list takes up very little room. It is stored in prefs.js file, under user_pref("noscript.untrusted". My *entire* prefs.js file is 22kb, and after years of using NoScript and accumulating Untrusted sites, the Untrusted list is only about 2kb of that. No reason to trouble yourself with purging it to save space.

I agree that occasionally purging your Whitelist of sites that you no longer use is a good thing. I don't see that a hit counter helps. I may use a certain trusted site only once or twice a year. Again, the storage of this list consumes very little disk space.

I'm sorry that the spam filter was overly aggressive. On the other hand, before answering your post I banned a dozen spammers and deleted their posts, and there are more still to be done. So perhaps it isn't aggressive enough. Tip: Try putting blocked words, sites, etc. in "Code" tags. This may help.

Hitcounting = When the site was last accessed + how many times.
Edit: this should probably has meaning attemps to load script from given site

Originally I wanted to mention AdBlock filter to illustrate what I mean by hit counting, that I wiped to deal with filter issue.

By Purging of Untrasted I do not follow space saving, but to review Untrusted sites and eventually unblock those you mean not to be blocked. One can easily forget he has some sites in Untrusted lists. But my primary interest was in Whitelist. BTW the Untrusted could be also listed in settings as well as Whitelisted.

Purging cannot be of course applied blindly. But there can be hundreds of sites over years, visited few times a/o long time ago, without having clue what they are and how trustful are. Such hit stast can provide help to filter sites during manual cleaning.

Is not good policy to keep list not too long ?

Well, all spam filter are dealing trade offs false positives versus negatives... One cannot have 100% success in one area without affecting the other. BTW I may be wrong, but the filter does not say what causes the block.

Interesting is the filter calmed down.
It may got used to me...

poutnikl wrote:Hitcounting = When the site was last accessed + how many times.
Edit: this should probably has meaning attemps to load script from given site

As mentioned, what if I use a trusted site only once a year? (perhaps when doing my income taxes)

By Purging of Untrasted I do not follow space saving, but to review Untrusted sites and eventually unblock those you mean not to be blocked. One can easily forget he has some sites in Untrusted lists.

It doesn't matter if you forget. Please keep in mind that NoScript, by default, blocks *all* scripting, except for that in the default whitelist (which you may wish to purge) and that which you have deliberately added. So all other scripting is in fact "untrusted". The main purpose of having a separate Untrusted list is to *reduce the clutter in the script menu* by not having a dozen advertisers and data-miners listed along with the necessary ones.

It can't hurt you if you forget. As said, if a page doesn't work because you added a needed script to Untrusted, you will open the menu, check the scripts in the main menu, and if that doesn't work, then check those in the Untrusted sub-menu. You will be reminded by the failure of the page.

But my primary interest was in Whitelist. BTW the Untrusted could be also listed in settings as well as Whitelisted.

That has been requested many times, and will be in a future version of NoScript. When NoScript 3.x for the desktop is released, it will simplify these permissions and settings greatly.

Purging cannot be of course applied blindly. But there can be hundreds of sites over years, visited few times a/o long time ago, without having clue what they are and how trustful are.

If you can't remember and don't care to research it, delete it. You can always re-allow the site later if needed. It takes only one click.

Is not good policy to keep list not too long ?

Yes, it is good policy.
Which is a good reason to use "Temporarily Allow" instead of "Allow", until you are convinced that you will be visiting that site often enough to justify a permanent Allow.

Thanks for the reminder. I just cleaned out a few that were rendered obsolete by the merger of various financial institutions, and a few more that were duplicates. That leaves me with 39 entries in the Whitelist. How many do you have?

Well, all spam filter are dealing trade offs false positives versus negatives... One cannot have 100% success in one area without affecting the other.

Exactly. Thank you for understanding.

BTW I may be wrong, but the filter does not say what causes the block.

If it did, then the spammers would know exactly what to avoid, thus diminishing the value of the filter.

Interesting is the filter calmed down.
It may got used to me...

Your most recent posts contained nothing that could possibly be construed as indicating spam.
I don't know what you intended to post the first times, when the filter tripped. If you have a copy of it and are curious, PM it to me and I'll look at it some time.

If you can't remember and don't care to research it, delete it. You can always re-allow the site later if needed. It takes only one click.

Sure it is. Sorting by stats would help you not to delete items that you would reallow again in next minutes or hours.
But i agree now if you keep the list short, there is less need for that .

Thanks for the reminder. I just cleaned out a few that were rendered obsolete by the merger of various financial institutions, and a few more that were duplicates. That leaves me with 39 entries in the Whitelist. How many do you have?

About 70, after big cleaning.

poutnikl wrote: ...About 70, after big cleaning.

Very nice.

It would add much complexity and much new code to NoScript to do what you first requested, so may we now mark your request as being withdrawn?

Tom T. wrote: It would add much complexity and much new code to NoScript to do what you first requested, so may we now mark your request as being withdrawn?

Also, when there are inline scripts being blocked, should that count as one hit or many? It could easily become a complex issue, and in the end, it would mostly just be for interest's sake, rather like the existing script/object counter in the yellow bar notification.

Tom T. wrote: It would add much complexity and much new code to NoScript to do what you first requested, so may we now mark your request as being withdrawn?

I am always dealing with tradeoff off of 2 inconveniencies - allowing scripts versus managing whitelist.

But yes, I am reasonable person, I hope, I withdraw the request.

Such counters may have much more value for developers of AdBlock subscription block lists,
to tame their length and AdBlock extension performance.

poutnikl wrote: ...Such counters may have much more value for developers of AdBlock subscription block lists,
to tame their length and AdBlock extension performance.

I don't use AdBlockPlus, but this sounds reasonable, because ABP is based on blacklists: lists of sites to block, where as NS is whitelist based: all sites are blocked by default except those that are specifically in the whitelist. You have 70 entries in your whitelist, but I'll bet that the ABP block-list is in the thousands, or tens of thousands. (My HOSTS file has about 16,000 entries of sites that the browser is blocked from visiting, including malware sites as well as advertisers and data-miners.)

I will mark this as withdrawn. The discussion was interesting. Thank you for your interest and support of NoScript.
Cheers,

Just small note, that ABP blacklists do use hostnames, but mainly are focused to URL structures,
to be more universal and flexible, and also distinguishing AD and no AD content of same origin.

poutnikl wrote:Just small note, that ABP blacklists do use hostnames, but mainly are focused to URL structures,
to be more universal and flexible, and also distinguishing AD and no AD content of same origin.

I mentioned my Hosts file only to show the difference in number of entries between that (16,000+) and NS Whitelist (39).
In other words, to show that blacklisting will always produce more entries than default-block with whitelisting.

I'm sorry if that caused any confusion.

I will mention that *to my knowledge*, ABP does not actually block the advertising site from loading; it merely prevents it from being displayed. (I could be mistaken.)
HOSTS blocking prevents the site from loading even if you type the advertiser's URL into the address bar. In fact, it prevents the request from ever leaving your machine. However, this is off-topic to our discussion here, and not everyone agrees with using Hosts in this way. Again, I'm sorry to have brought it up.

No worry, no confusion. I have understood the reason why you mentioned your hosts file.
While hosts file make perfect sense for some purposes, it fails if you have to distinguish within the same site.

I also think it could be pain to maintain it, solving some sidee ffect due refused connection.
In past I was using DNSKong to serve similar purposes, acting as local DNS server / proxy.

Tom T. wrote:...

Haha, when I was trying to post last post with quoting you, I was catched by AS filter.
When I have removed your text, AS filter was satisfied.