How To Create Your Blacklist

1. An Example
2. Add One at a Time
3. Import a File
4. Advanced

If TLDR or you just want a starting point, download and import my blacklist!

An Example

Here's an example to explain how to add websites to your blacklist. You find yourself needlessly browsing eBay, so you add ebay.com to your blacklist.

But you remember ebay.ca, ebay.co.uk, and all of eBay's other regional sites, so you change it to ebay.* to block all of them, which technically works.

One day, you try to read this article, which has "ebay" in the URL, and you get a message that it's blocked! That's because ebay.* is blocking URLs that contain "ebay" and any characters that might come after.

To be specific and say you want to block eBay's websites, you can add https?://(www.)?ebay.*. This says, "URLs that start with 'http' or 'https', followed by '://', maybe followed by 'www.', then 'ebay' followed by whatever else."

However, if you don't want to be specific and you never want to be exposed to any mention of eBay under any circumstances, you can just add ebay. You can be even less specific, blocking the entire Internet with .*. See the Advanced section to understand how to use these symbols to give you that flexibility.

You can add websites to your blacklist one at a time or import a whole blacklist from a text file.

Add One at a Time

To add one at a time, type into the text box labeled "Enter a pattern:" on Your Blacklist page and click the "Add" button.

Import a File

To create a blacklist text file, open a text editor, write one pattern per line, and save it as a .txt file. Lines that begin with # will be skipped over. That way, you can write notes or make sections and headings to keep it organized.

To import a blacklist text file, click "Upload a file" on Your Blacklist page, select a .txt file, and either combine the imported file with your existing blacklist or replace your existing blacklist with the imported file.

You can also save your current blacklist to a text file by clicking the "Export" button.

Advanced

A pattern is a regular expression for a sequence of characters that appears in a website's URL. Patterns use symbols to act as placeholders for characters so that you can block websites more generally instead of blocking a website by giving its specific URL. Here's what each symbol represents: