adblockfilters

Why does this extension do only half of the job? Automatic download is missing!

Adblock Plus can already download a filter list periodically by itself. Telling Adblock Plus to do so is as easy as opening the options window (clicking the arrow of the toolbar button or right clicking the status bar icon) and opening the dialog for adding a new filter subscription from the "Filters" menu. In this dialog you give the subscription a name of your choice (e.g. "My Own") and give the URL you're uploading the filters to.

What protocols are supported?

Only FTP, HTTP and HTTPS or saving to a file. (Due to the shortcomings of the FTP protocol, when multiple computers are synchronizing at the very same moment, there is a very slight risk of losing some filters.)

If there is a chance of the computer being used in an untrusted network (e.g. a public WIFI), use of HTTPS is greatly encouraged, since in the other cases username and password are transmitted unencrypted. There is no support for FTPS or SFTP since Firefox (or Thunderbird, SeaMonkey etc.) does not support these protocols.

Why doesn't FTP work?

For most people, FTP works just fine. But in some cases it just doesn't work with either no error message or something like "Unkown Error". This seems to happen when the FTP server allows anonymous logins, but only for downloads, not for uploads. Firefox (and Thunderbird, SeaMonkey etc.) always first attempts to log in as anonymous and only asks for username and password when that fails. I can't seem to find a way around this.

Is there any way to synchronize two Adblock Plus installations?

Yes, since version 2.0, the Adblock Plus Filter Uploader now also supports synchronization. In fact, it is the default option now.

Where are the filters uploaded to?

If you want to provide a file others can subscribe to as a filter subscription in Adblock Plus and/or if you want to synchronize your filters on different computers, you will need to get some web space to store the file online. There are many free providers, although you probably won't get important features like a encrypted connection or

If you only want to synchronize multiple Adblock Plus installations on the same computer you can also store the filters in a file.

What should I put into the Host and Path fields?

This depends on your hosting provider. However, most follow some conventions. Given your files are available at http://www.example.com/yourusername/, the host will most likely be either example.com or ftp.example.com and the path will be /yourusername/adblock.txt or just /adblock.txt. In some cases, for files to be available via http they need to be in a special directory called /www/ or similar.
Note that the host isn't preceeded by "ftp://" or "http://".
Also, the path MUST contain the filename (e.g. adblock.txt). If you're just providing a folder name, you'll get a (mostly meaningless) error message.

Is there a way to include the modification date in the file?

In comments, the text $DATE is replaced with date and time of the upload. So you can add this comment, for example:

! Last Modified: $DATE

The exact output depends on your operating system and whether you use synchronization - on a German Ubuntu the uploaded file could contain a line like this:

! Last Modified: Mo 09 Feb 2009 19:21:06 CET

Why can't I enable gzip compression?

Gzip compression is only supported in Gecko 1.9 (Firefox 3) applications and higher. In older versions, gzip compression is not available.

How do I have to configure my web server so I can use gzip compression?

Well, that depends on what server software you're using. In the case of Apache, you need to put something like the following in your httpd.conf or .htaccess:

<Files adblock.txt.gz>
       AddType text/plain .gz
       AddEncoding gzip .gz
       AddCharset UTF-8 .gz
</Files> 

For other servers, make sure that the file is served with the following headers:

Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Content-Encoding: gzip