[jcraig]

Another Camino/Firefox user here giving Omniweb a spin, having not used it since the early days of OSX. I, too, am having problems with the adblocking feature. I don't know too many "regular users" who are well versed in the use or syntax of regular expressions. I've tried copying/pasting filters from my Firefox adblock list (adding them one at a time is a rather cumbersome process). Right-clicking unwanted images is fine, as long as they are not Flash ads. Then, the process becomes opening Site Preferences, finding the source of the unwanted image/ad, then hopefully write the filter correctly in regex so that it works. Unfortunately, when I go to Foxnews' site for example, it's just full of ads in Omniweb. I don't see any in Camino (using Camitools).

Something to consider would be one click importing of filters, whether from the Pogo site, or something hosted by Omni. I'm afraid when adblocking was implemented, people were thinking like developers rather than end users. It really hasn't evolved much since the v.4 days and OSX 10.1.

Otherwise, I've been pretty impressed with this beta. It's fast, stable, looks good. Add in a user-friendly adblocking scheme and I'm sold.

[Jan]

Originally Posted by jcraig

Something to consider would be one click importing of filters, whether from the Pogo site, or something hosted by Omni. I'm afraid when adblocking was implemented, people were thinking like developers rather than end users. It really hasn't evolved much since the v.4 days and OSX 10.1.

I must agree with that point. I think there're some people out there who know
how to handle OW's way to ad-block and who set up a big list of blocked pages.
Why shouldn't we give those a way to contribute there lists and make OW
more useable for the end-user, who's not always a developer himself.

[blet]

Would Filterset.G (http://www.pierceive.com) be compatible with Omniweb? Obviously there needs to be a way to import it but are the rules as the are compatible or do they only work for firefox's adblock?

[Forrest]

IMHO, it sounds like new OW users are thinking adblocking is complicated like the other options. Sure there are complicated solutions, but there are simple ones that work very well.

[jcraig]

No pussyfooting around, let's obliterate ads once and for all. First, go to the yoyo site and copy the list of evil ads servers in the proper format. Hosts file format is good. Copy the whole thing (you don't need the comments at the top). Now, hang on to this for a minute. Now comes the tricky part. You have to open Text Edit as Root via Terminal. Here's the command: sudo /Applications/TextEdit.app/Contents/MacOS/TextEdit /etc/hosts Again, this opens Text Edit as root user, so be careful. PLace your cursor at the end of the list in the hosts file, hit Return so you're on a new line, then Paste the list you copied from yoyo. Each entry should look something like:

127.0.0.1 js.adsonar.com


As your are now a root user, be sure to save your changes to the Hosts file, Quit Text Edit, Quit Terminal, log out or restart. These ads won't even make it to your browser now, as the front door will be slammed in their face. Omniweb, Webkit, and others are much nicer to browse with.

If you find too much is being blocked, you can go back into Hosts the same way, and remove servers you don't want blocked.

[Forrest]

Yeah, but that doesn't allow me to do it on a per-site basis :)

[mjuengling]

I haven't read the whole thread, but I'm guessing some of us don't know how to block flash ads.

For me is that a way:

Surf to the site. Open the site "preferences inspector". Jump over to "Page Info". There you can search for PlugIns with flash content, mark it with one klick and then choose "Display".

A new window appears with the flash content and the original adress in the adress bar. Now you can copy the adress and insert it in your blocking list.

You can either choose the whole adress or set an asterix (*) in it.

Example: http://www.forums.omnigroup.com/ads/...ch332wmdcnhdhe

This is better: http://www.forums.omnigroup.com/ads/*

I hope that will help someone.

[zottel]

Just a hint for those who don't know how to cope with regular expressions:

The following entry in the blocked URLs list filters out nearly everything:

/ad[^dm]

Translated, it means: Filter any URL that has "/ad" somwhere in it's path, but not if a d or an m follows (in order not to block stuff like "/additional" or "/admin").

Additionally, I have the following two known adserver that aren't matched by the above:

\.falkag\.
some\.ad\.com

These are in my whitelist:

\.wikimedia\.
/adsense/

The first because there are alphabetical dirs on wikimedia, including /ad/; the second because I have a Google Ads account myself which I can't look into if /adsense/ is blocked. :-)

I also have \.swf in my list to block flash, but it depends on if you really want to block all flash or not.

Might have some false positives, but not many. And blocks nearly everything.

Btw, please don't suggest OW should use glob patterns for ad blocking. (Glob patterns are those most of you are probably used to, where "*" means "any char, 0 or multiple times".) They are BY FAR not as powerful as regular expressions. The example from above wouldn't be possible, e.g..

And, if you want to play around with regular expressions, a Google search for "regular expressions tutorial" will probably yield some good results.

[LewistonianExonian]

Thank you to the other posters! My greatest frustration with omniweb has been getting ad blocking to work to my satisfaction. This forum has helped me do that in a matter of minutes. (unfortunately it took hours of googling to find.)

Here's my blocklist: (so far)
\.falkag\.
/ad[^dm]
/.atdmt\.com/*
\.advertising\.com/*
\.tribalfusion\.com/*

I also have a whitelist, as suggested above:
\.wikimedia\.
/adsense/

[zottel]

Originally Posted by JKT

It would be /.\*.gif I believe (at least that is what works for .swf).

Didn't see that when reading it for the first time. It's wrong (typo?). X-)

This regex would block any URL that has in it: a slash (/) followed by any char (.) followed by an asterisk (\* - normally, an asterisk woud mean "the char before, zero or more times"; it is escaped by the backslash, though, so \* just means "one asterisk"), followed by any char (.), followed by the string "gif". I would, for example, match on the URL http://some.host.com/a*bgif/index.html - if * was allowed in URLs. ;-)

You probably meant /.*\.gif - which means: a slash (/) followed by any char (.) zero or more times (*), followed by a period (\. - this time the . is escaped and thus literally means "one period") followed by the string "gif".

This is somewhat more and also less than needed, though. Why look for the slash? There will be one already at the beginning of the URL (in http://), so it makes no sense to use it for the match. Additionally, "/.*\.gif" also matches anywhere inside the string, not only at the end. So the (hypothetical) URL "http://home.user.com/great.gifs/me.jpg" would be blocked, too.

a) You don't have to match the whole string via .* - the regex "bart" will match "bart" as well as "bartsimpson", "simpson, bart" or any other string containing "bart" anywhere inside.

b) If you want the end, use "$", which stands for "end of string" (or end of line, to be precise).

So, to match all URLs ending with ".gif", the most straightforward way will be to use "\.gif$". (A literal period (\.), followed by the string "gif" (gif), followed by the end of the string ($).)

Similarly, \.swf$ can be used to block all flash content (at least if the URL really ends with .swf, but that's the case, normally :-) ).