Explain Like I'm Five

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ELI5: How are these massive adblock lists kept updated so regularly? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by DeadNinja@lemmy.world to c/explainlikeimfive@lemmy.world

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Do they get some kind of real-time feed that tells them "hey this URL popped up in the web today, but it is a tracker, so block it", or is this exercise is mostly helped by the crowd ?

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[–] slazer2au@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Regular expression magic.

A lot of ad networks have a pattern to the name or the window the advert appears in.

Using regular expression you can find just the adwindow and ignore the actual content.

Now what is regular expression? A wizard language.
ask any programmer about RE after 4 beers and watch the hate wash over their face.

[–] JPAKx4@lemmy.sdf.org 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I love regex, I'm not even gonna lie. To be fair, my expressions haven't been 50+ characters long, but still.

[–] Zikeji@programming.dev 1 points 1 year ago

Same, I've never understood the hate. But then again I memorize based off of patterns and regex in my brain is just a pattern.

[–] Scubus@sh.itjust.works 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Decade of c# game design under my belt, but never dealt with web scripting. Am I missing out?

[–] slazer2au@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

You are missing out on headaches.