Advice Request Which block lists do you use with UBO, AG and ABP ?

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floalma

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Apr 5, 2015
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These are among others the one I'm using from my different browsers FF, Brave and Chrome based.

AdGuard Annoyances

Peter Lowe’s Ad and tracking server list

Top500 most used ad & trackers in West Europe & North America

http : // vxvault . net/URL_List . php

Block-EU-Cookie-#####-List

I don't care about cookies

Online Malicious URL Blocklist

Reduce Google nuisances on search, maps and youtube


Which block list do you use for now ?

How do you cope with the overlapped lists ? Do you compare, cleaned your list ?

Do you make your own customized list ?

Any comment or contribution will be great, thank you all.
 
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SeriousHoax

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my current filter list on uBo. What do you think folks? it's ok or maybe could be overloaded? :unsure:
I think you don't need I don't care about cookies. Fanboy's Annoyances already covers that. Spam404 isn't probably needed either but you can keep it if you wish.
Peter Lowe's list isn't needed either with 1host (mini). Looks like you're using the host version of 1host(mini). Use the adblcoker variant. It contains everything the host version has with 20k less filters.
 

YuanJiawj

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Oct 9, 2014
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I think you don't need I don't care about cookies. Fanboy's Annoyances already covers that. Spam404 isn't probably needed either but you can keep it if you wish.
Peter Lowe's list isn't needed either with 1host (mini). Looks like you're using the host version of 1host(mini). Use the adblcoker variant. It contains everything the host version has with 20k less filters.
1Hosts Mini (Adblockers) or 1Hosts Complete (Adblockers)?
Thanks for your advices!
 

SeriousHoax

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ErzCrz

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Aug 19, 2019
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Privacy concerned users beware though. Filters check for links offline, but smartscreen and integrated antimalware features check online. Just so you know. ;)
True but M$ will always know what sites I use as will my ISP for Sky Broadband Shield (ISP DNS just malware/phishing category selected) unless I use a VPN. It's finding a balance I guess. Probably easier using a browser with built-in adblocking like Brave or opera but Chromium edge works best with my Windows Defender H_C setup. I've done the common TLDs list in UBO My Filters but that seems to slow things down.

Anyway, the simpler approach or default deny works best for me. NoScript used to save my bacon all the time.
 

Lenny_Fox

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Oct 1, 2019
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These are among others the one I'm using from my different browsers FF, Brave and Chrome based.

AdGuard Annoyances

Peter Lowe’s Ad and tracking server list

Top500 most used ad & trackers in West Europe & North America

http://vxvault.net/URL_List.php

Block-EU-Cookie--List

I don't care about cookies

Online Malicious URL Blocklist

Reduce Google nuisances on search, maps and youtube


Which block list do you use for now ?

How do you cope with the overlapped lists ? Do you compare, cleaned your list ?

Do you make your own customized list ?

Any comment or contribution will be great, thank you all.
@security123 posted that top500 list will be end of life soon. He also posted that the /EU_US_most_common_trackers is thr sucessor. I am also using this list which has nearly 5000 rules.

I took some random domains from Peter Low, Disconnect and Ghostery and the Kees1958/BeerIsGood list seems to have 80 percent of those three.

So the 'EU_US_most_common' looks like a viable alternative to those 3 (so using this list replaces peter low, disconnect, ghostery and old top500).
 

Lenny_Fox

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@SeriousHoax don't get me started 😉

Adguard filters are better maintained than Easylist filters, so even for uBO users I would advice to use AdGuard block lists instead Easylist/Fanboy. With three filters AG should give you a good internet experience (in terms of website breakage, advertisement hassle and tracking concerns). What you will miss are the rules which are practically never triggered (left 'normal' filter rules count, right 'optimized' filter rules count).

1605857853185.png



Take in mind that AG has a paid service (expanding to dns/vpn service) which provides them the means to maintain their filters, so imagine how much dead wood and stale rules are present in less well maintained blocklists. User initiated blocklists work well for ADDING new rules, not for REMOVING stale rules. For removing stale rules you need an AUTOMATED process (check whether the website is still up and running).

So for starters what you miss out are stale rules, blocking dead-non existent websites or links to those dead websites.

In an old scientific study (see my thread about adblock innivation) adblockers with few rules (Ghostery, Disconnect) were as effective as large blocklist adblockers (AdBlock and uBlockOrigin). In this study Adguard was not included, but AdGuard with optimized filters is somewhere in between, a smart medium sized blocklist adblocker. Reason why those small blocklists are as effective is explained by Peter Low "The ad banners that you see all over the web are stored on servers. Stopping your computer communicating with another computer can be quite simple. So, if you have a list of the servers used for ad banners, it's easy to stop ad banners even getting to your browser" (link to source).

Large blocklist try to block ads on the websites you VISIT, small blocklist try to block LINKS to the servers (of ad and tracking networks) on the websites you visit. The advantage of focussing on the networks serving the websites you visit is because they are in numbers only a fraction of the number of websites in the world (Because it takes a lot of means (money and people) to setup and maintain these ad and tracking networks).

Also advertising delivery is handled by brokers in between companies wanting to advertise and website owners offering advertising space. For website owners it saves time and cost to let the brokers handle the advertising on their websites. For companies wanting to advertise it is way simpler and effective to pay a limited number of brokers for actual ad-VIEWS, in stead of millions of website owners for ad-PLACEMENT. So focussing on websites you visit is putting the horse behind the cart. It simply makes no sense, because it is not how the advertising industry is organized. This is the reason small blocklists are as effective as large blocklists when visiting the top 10 million websites (e.g. websites with more than 300 visitors per day).

In theory large blocklist are more effective for niche websites, because they focus on the websites people visit. The achilles heel of focusing on the website people visit, is that a blocklist might contain a lot of block-rules for website you will never visit and more likely won't have any block rules for the websites you do visit.

This is where the optimized rules feature of AdGuard comes in. Some people allow AdGuard to collect statistics about ad filter usage. The rules which are nearly never triggered by ALL AdGuard users allowing "send statistics about ad filter usage" are NOT included in the optimized filters. So when AdGuard has a lot of users in your region, you probably miss out on NOTHING!

When you live in an exotic country with few AdGuard users, chances you miss out of something is still zero to nothing. As shown by the picture optimizing rules cut out around 70K rules. Considering there are around 400 million active websited (link to source), chance any of those dropped 70K rules cover one of the 400M niche websites is only 0.0175%. A blog published by Brave Browser team claims that "over 90% of EasyList appears to provide little benefit for common browsing cases" (link to source). Therefore it is proabably GOOD PRACTICE TO INCLUDE THE EasyList Blocklist in YOUR LANGUAGE when available. @SeriousHoax I could not find ABP-blocklist in Bengali.

When you don't believe me (I am one of bad guys working in digital marketing), think about this: Mister GorHill has proven with benchmarks that performance is not an issue when using large blocklists (well he convienantly forgot to take blocklist load time into consideration). When performance is not the issue and large blocklist are as good as uBO-fanboys say WHY WOULD FIREFOX and MICROSOFT use the small blocklists of Disconnect?

Why would those companies whose core business is browsing (Firefox) and cloud based computing (Microsoft) offer an inferior anti-tracking mechanism when they need to provide potential users a compelling reason to switch from Google to Firefox or Edge? When large blocklists really would be more effective and the best adblocker (uBlockOrigin) according to large blocklist fans is open source, why not use uBO as build-in adblocker with all those large blocklist?
 
Last edited:

SeriousHoax

Level 49
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Mar 16, 2019
3,862
@SeriousHoax don't get me started 😉

Adguard filters are better maintained than Easylist filters, so even for uBO users I would advice to use AdGuard block lists instead Easylist/Fanboy. With three filters AG should give you a good internet experience (in terms of website breakage, advertisement hassle and tracking concerns). What you will miss are the rules which are practically never triggered (left 'normal' filter rules count, right 'optimized' filter rules count).

View attachment 249356


Take in mind that AG has a paid service (expanding to dns/vpn service) which provides them the means to maintain their filters, so imagine how much dead wood and stale rules are present in less well maintained blocklists. User initiated blocklists work well for ADDING new rules, not for REMOVING stale rules. For removing stale rules you need an AUTOMATED process (check whether the website is still up and running).

So for starters what you miss out are stale rules, blocking dead-non existent websites or links to those dead websites.

In an old scientific study (see my thread about adblock innivation) adblockers with few rules (Ghostery, Disconnect) were as effective as large blocklist adblockers (AdBlock and uBlockOrigin). In this study Adguard was not included, but AdGuard with optimized filters is somewhere in between, a smart medium sized blocklist adblocker. Reason why those small blocklists are as effective is explained by Peter Low "The ad banners that you see all over the web are stored on servers. Stopping your computer communicating with another computer can be quite simple. So, if you have a list of the servers used for ad banners, it's easy to stop ad banners even getting to your browser" (link to source).

Large blocklist try to block ads on the websites you VISIT, small blocklist try to block LINKS to the servers (of ad and tracking networks) on the websites you vist. Because it takes a lot of means (money and people) to setup and maintain these ad and tracking networks AND the advertising delivery is handled by brokers in between companies wanting to advertise and website owners offering advertising space there are only a limited number of ad and tracking networks. This is the reason small blocklists are as effective as large blocklists when visiting the top 10 million websites (e.g. websites with more than 300 visitors per day).

In theory large blocklist are more effective for niche websites, because they focus on the websites people visit. The achilles heel of focusing on the website people visit, is that a blocklist might contain a lot of block-rules for website you will never visit. This is where the optimized rules feature of AdGuard comes in. Some people allow AdGuard to collect statistics about ad filter usage. The rules which are nearly never triggered by ALL AdGuard users allowing "send statistics about ad filter usage" are NOT included in the optimized filters. So when AdGuard has a lot of users in your region, you probably miss out on NOTHING!

When you live in an exotic country with few AdGuard users, chances you miss out of something is still zero to nothing. As shown by the picture optimizing rules cut out around 70K rules. Considering there are around 400 million active websited (link to source), chance any of those dropped 70K rules cover one of the 400M niche websites you visit in your exotic region is only 0.0175%. A blog published by Brave Browser team claims that "over 90% of EasyList appears to provide little benefit for common browsing cases" (link to source). So this seems to confirm my calculation based on dropped stale rules and number of websites in the world.

When you don't believe me (I am one of bad guys working in digital marketing), think about this: Mister GorHill has proven with benchmarks that performance is not an issue when using large blocklists (well he convienantly forgot to take blocklist load time into consideration). When performance is not the issue and large blocklist are as good as uBO-fanboys say WHY WOULD FIREFOX and MICORSOFT use the small blocklists of Disconnect?

Why would those companies whose core business is browsing (Firefox) and cloud based computing (Microsoft) offer an inferior anti-tracking mechanism when they need to provide potential users a compelling reason to switch from Google to Firefox or Edge? When large blocklists really would be more effective and the best adblocker (uBlockOrigin) according to large blocklist fans is open source, why not use uBO as build-in adblocker with all those large blocklist?
Thanks for explaining in details. Ok I'll try out the optimized filters to see how it goes. What would be the best way to test this? Should I import optimized filters in uBO or enable optimized mode in Adguard extension?
 

Lenny_Fox

Level 22
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Oct 1, 2019
1,120
Thanks for explaining in details. Ok I'll try out the optimized filters to see how it goes. What would be the best way to test this? Should I import optimized filters in uBO or enable optimized mode in Adguard extension?
CORRECTED: YES, disable all filters except uBO's own and import AG optimized filters from FILTERLISTS.COM (see suggestion of @Gandalf_The_Grey below).


When you don't use uBO in advance mode, consider switching to AdGuard, enable the filters as shown in post #74 (link) the picture and enable optimized filters.
1605863591495.png

Add these two rules to your 'User rules' section for enhanced security (medium mode blocking for HTTP) and privacy ( ||*$ping,cookie=__cfduid). By the end of this year flash is discontinued, so you can leave out the object in this privacy enhancing rule. Only enable medium mode blocking for HTTP when your region is converted to HTTPS.

1605864404089.png


Next enable stealth mode with below (safe) conservative settings (assuming you clear session cookies when closing the browser).
1605864907241.png

Note: when you have Hide referrer from third-parties enabled in uBO and that does not break a website you visit, you can enable it in AG also.
 
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JasonUK

Level 5
Apr 14, 2020
240
Interesting comments re: UBO v AdGuard (I've got both extensions installed but latter is disabled).

@Lenny_Fox ~ you say that optimised AdGuard filters aren't available for UBO but they do show on Filterlists with the UBO compatibility symbol although I note AdGuard Base optimised is actually AdGuard Base+Easylist optimised?

Also can you install custom lists like Kees1958 and are you able to add filters to 'my filters' used on UBO like

! --- Block CNAME trackers not covered by EasyPrivacy (Removes need for Frogeye 1st-Party Tracker Filterlist)
/id?d_visid_ver=$~xmlhttprequest
/id?d_visid_

or the much abused generic & country code TLDs like
||*.bid^$all or ||*.am^$all for example

or does AdGuard already cover these adequately?

Thanks
 

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