Topic: E621 Blacklist Organization

Greetings all, apologies if this sounds weird or isn't something that would be considered normal.

The blacklist. A way to control what content we see and keep what we don't want to see hidden so we don't get all uppity and having fits over seeing what we don't like. It's not perfect, but it's overall good and works.

However, when blacklisting certain things it tends to get very messy, very quickly, one thing I'd personally love to see or come back given my memory, is the ability to organize the blacklist in alphabetical order like I seem to remember it being a few years ago. I'm not too sure exactly how far back, but I do remember having the ability to organize my blacklist so it didn't feel haphazardly thrown together.

Hopefully this can be a thing if it wasn't or return if it was.

Thanks for reading.

I wouldn't know about automatic sorting, but you can use comments on your blacklist by adding a # to the start of the line... which someone forgot to put on the help page. Lemme go take care of that...

aacafah said:
I wouldn't know about automatic sorting, but you can use comments on your blacklist by adding a # to the start of the line... which someone forgot to put on the help page. Lemme go take care of that...

Thanks for the reply. I do hope it becomes a feature still. I remember a button that said add & sort when modifying your blacklist via the account page some years ago and I do have some organized blacklists in mine from that era, but it gets messy as I found more stuff I didn't want to see.

Honestly it would be great if the site stopped stripping blank lines from the blacklist as well. Blank lines help visually separate different parts of the blacklist.

"alphabetic sorting"

GUI user problems.

For me, it's just -- Copy blacklist text, xsel -ob | sort | xsel -ib in terminal, Paste back over original blacklist text.

Honestly, there are probably 50 poorly-thought out Windows apps to sort lines of text.

But there's also online tools, eg this

You can probably even do it with a bookmarklet (short Javascript snippet), given that the capacity to sort arrays is built into Javascript. uhh.. text.split("\n").toSorted().join("\n") looks like it would do the main part of the work. So I guess 'whether the script could access the localStorage for E621 in order to read / write the blacklist text' is the critical question.

kyiiel said:
Honestly it would be great if the site stopped stripping blank lines from the blacklist as well. Blank lines help visually separate different parts of the blacklist.

Just start those blank lines with a #.

kyiiel said:
Honestly it would be great if the site stopped stripping blank lines from the blacklist as well. Blank lines help visually separate different parts of the blacklist.

Hmm. Is this legacy code from when blacklists were stored in a cookie rather than localStorage, and actually needed to be minimized?

I agree that blanks have a good use.

savageorange said:
Hmm. Is this legacy code from when blacklists were stored in a cookie rather than localStorage, and actually needed to be minimized?

I agree that blanks have a good use.

Unless you're talking about prior to March 2020 (which even then I doubt it was), it was never in a cookie

And even then that's only the anonymous blacklist

TBH I don't have the slightest idea what other kind of client-side storage it could have been other than a cookie.

clawstripe said:
Just start those blank lines with a #.

Then they wouldn't be blank.

Personally, I've just tested a strange but effective idea:
Unique amounts of U+2801 BRAILLE PATTERN BLANK (⠀)

That is to say, the first 'blank line' is just one of those characters inside the parentheses there.
The second is two of those.
Etc.

If that's too hard to figure out what the heck is going on when you come back to it, you could use multiples of U+203e OVERLINE (‾) instead, for a kind of 'horizontal rule' effect.

The principle is just to look like a unique tag that no-one would actually ever use.

savageorange said:
TBH I don't have the slightest idea what other kind of client-side storage it could have been other than a cookie.

Cookies are really one of the worst places to store clientside data, their maximum size is tiny (4096 characters or 4KB), and they are not intended for client use. They're intended to be set by the server, sent to the client, then sent back to the server to identify the client
The anonymous blacklist never touches the server

All of that is put into local storage, which depending on browser has a max size of between 2MB-10MB and will never be sent to the server

donovan_dmc said:

All of that is put into local storage, which depending on browser has a max size of between 2MB-10MB

You're describing the current situation.
But a big deal was made over moving to localStorage loosening blacklist limits.
Does that not imply that it was something else beforehand?

savageorange said:
You're describing the current situation.
But a big deal was made over moving to localStorage loosening blacklist limits.
Does that not imply that it was something else beforehand?

When was that big deal made? It has been in local storage for just short of 6 years

https://github.com/e621ng/e621ng/blob/3589357673c6f1b051adf7d4ce5ab3136b55d4fd/app/javascript/src/javascripts/blacklists.js#L282

donovan_dmc said:
When was that big deal made? It has been in local storage for just short of 6 years

https://github.com/e621ng/e621ng/blob/3589357673c6f1b051adf7d4ce5ab3136b55d4fd/app/javascript/src/javascripts/blacklists.js#L282

That timeline seems about right.