Filterset.G

» see pierceive.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Around 2005 the first thing you did to a fresh Firefox install was give it a filter list. Adblock on its own was a mechanism with no content: it could hide anything matching a pattern, and it shipped with no patterns, so out of the box it blocked precisely nothing. Somebody had to write the patterns. For several years, for most people, that somebody was Graham Pierce.

Filterset.G started in July 2004 and grew, by its author's own description, out of a list of personal filters plus whatever users reported back. It was the first filter list to get real distribution, at a point when the expected workflow was that every user wrote their own rules. A companion extension called Adblock Filterset.G Updater, written by Micheal McDonald and Reid Rankin, pulled the latest version down once a week, because Adblock itself had no update machinery at the time. That pairing turned ad blocking from a configuration exercise into something you could tell a relative to install over the phone.

It was also a one-person operation funded by a PayPal button, and the homepage said so with a bluntness nobody manages anymore: "If you use and enjoy Filterset.G, please consider making a donation; I'm struggling to break even on hosting costs." Underneath, in parentheses, a note that PayPal's minimum fee was 31 cents and that anything smaller arrived as nothing.

I was on TTNet broadband by then and Firefox had replaced Internet Explorer on my machine the way it did on most engineers' machines in that window. Blocking ads in 2005 was a bandwidth decision before it was ever a political one. A page that skipped four banner images finished loading, and on a connection that was broadband mostly by comparison with what came before, that was the whole argument.

~ the dossier ~

~ how the list worked ~

Pierce's whole engineering problem was that popularity cost money directly. Every subscriber checking for updates was a hit on a server paid for out of pocket, and the list kept getting larger. The answer was to route downloads through Coral CDN, a free peer-to-peer caching network, and to control how often clients were allowed to check at all.

That second decision is the one that caused trouble. When Adblock Plus arrived with its own built-in subscription updater, Pierce deliberately made Filterset.G incompatible with it, so that using the list still required installing the separate updater extension. From inside the project that was the only way to keep update traffic throttled and pointed at the CDN. From outside it read as gatekeeping, and it was the reason the rest of the ecosystem stopped defending the list.

~ the fight with adblock plus ~

On 23 November 2006 Wladimir Palant, the author of Adblock Plus, published a post titled "Sorry Filterset.G but it is time for you to go." The argument was partly about false positives and partly about plumbing. The alternatives had shorter records of blocking the wrong thing, and they worked through the subscription dialog without demanding an extra extension. The recommended replacements included EasyList.

EasyList is still here, maintained by a rotating group, and it is the default in nearly every blocker shipping today. The handover had no paperwork behind it. One popular tool's author told the users of another to go somewhere else, and most of them went. Two years of quiet decline followed before the money actually ran out.

~ the date everyone has wrong ~

The record says Filterset.G was discontinued on 3 February 2008. That claim has carried a citation-needed tag since May 2012, and the site itself disagrees. Captures of pierceive.com from March, May and December of 2008 all show a live homepage advertising "Latest version: 2008-03-08a," a release dated a month after the supposed shutdown.

The real date is sitting in the archive. The capture from 17 December 2008 is the ordinary homepage, 2,856 bytes, links intact. The next capture is 122 bytes larger and is not a homepage at all: everything except one line has been wrapped in HTML comments, and what is left reads "pierceive.com will be PERMANTENLY taken down within the next week. I'm out of donation money, and I can't afford to keep the site up out of pocket. Sorry." The misspelling is the author's own. Replaying that capture with headers returns last-modified: Thu, 18 Dec 2008 14:24:11 GMT, which is the minute somebody opened that file and commented out their own website.

The week was optimistic. The site was still answering in April 2009, with that single sentence sitting above a page of invisible markup, and the merged filter file was still downloadable at the end of that month. The forum outlasted the front page by more than a year. By July 2010 pierceive.com was a parking lander selling related searches, and the sentence was gone.

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