How to whitelist a web site

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• Big power button
• Detailed syntax
  • Plain hostname
  • Single web page
  • Section of a web site
  • Specific pattern
  • Regular expression
• Whitelisting Youtube channel
• Disabling filtering temporarily or by default (blacklist mode)
• Other details

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Click the big power button

It serves to whitelist the current web site, and its state will be remembered next time you visit the web site.

Detailed syntax

All whitelist directives are matched against the URL address of web pages.

As of version uBlock 0.8.2.0, the whitelist directive syntax is split into three classes:

• Plain
• Complex
• Comment

Plain syntax is when using only hostname label(s), which means only the hostname portion of a URL will be taken into account. With plain syntax, the matching is performed by comparing the right-most portion of the page hostname with the whitelist directive. Wildcards are not allowed when using plain syntax.

Complex syntax occurs if and only if at least one / appears in a whitelist directive. Optionally, the wildcard * can be used with complex directives for more flexibility.

A comment is a line prefixed with #. Comments are ignored by uBlock.

If no / appears in a whitelist directive, and if the directive contains characters which are not allowed for a plain hostname, then the whitelist directive will be commented out and ignored by uBlock. This allows you to fix your directive.

Plain hostname

• example.com: whitelist all pages from example.com or above (i.e. example.com, www.example.com).
• www.example.org: whitelist all pages from www.example.org or above (i.e. www.example.org, forums.www.example.org, but not example.org).
• org: whitelist all pages from TLD org (i.e. example.org, wikipedia.org).

Single web page

• https://www.twitch.tv/letofski: whitelist only this one page, i.e. when the URL in the address bar matches exactly https://www.twitch.tv/letofski.

Section of a web site

• https://www.twitch.tv/letofski*: whitelist this one page, and everything underneath, i.e. when the URL in the address bar starts exactly with https://www.twitch.tv/letofski.

Specific pattern

• *reddit.com/r/privacy/*

Wildcards can be used at any position. However, when a wildcard is used within the hostname portion of a directive, it cannot be at the end of the hostname, and also must be at the boundary of a hostname label.

Regular expression (1.9.17+)

• /^https?://192\.168\.0\.\d+//
• /^https://[0-9a-z-]+//

When you are facing a case where no other directive syntax work, you may use a regular expression ("regex") as a last resort solution. When a whitelist directive starts and ends with a forward slash (/), uBO will treat the directive as a regex-based one.

Given that whitelist directives dictate where uBO should be completely disabled, be very careful with regex-based directives, you could easily mistakenly cause uBO to be disabled on more sites than you intended. Typically, only advanced users will resort to regex-based directives, and only for cases where no other syntax can do the job.

Whitelisting Youtube channel

There are two ways to do this:

1. By browser extension.

   Kept updated, should be easy to use, point and click, with good description of usage.

2. Using one of the user scripts from Greasy Fork based on YouTube - whitelist channels in uBlock Origin.

   Simple, with clearly visible code, but can be outdated. Someone posted instructions on Reddit, it was years ago, but explains few things: "Any way to whitelist certain youtube channels?".

Warning! These are third party tools, I can't vouch for them, you will have to find out for yourself whether they work.

Disabling filtering temporarily or by default (blacklist mode)

Be aware! Following abilities are just side effects of uBO features and no additional work will be done to improve support for them^1,2.

Following pages describe how to disable filtering with help of dynamic filtering:

• Turn off uBlock everywhere temporarily
• Turn off uBlock everywhere except (blacklist mode).

Black list mode can also be achieved by specifically crafted Regular Expression whitelist directive:

/^((?!example\.com|different\.example\.net|another\.example\.org).)*$/

With this directive all domains put between | characters will be treated as blacklisted, and uBO will be enabled only on these pages.

Other details

If you re-enable uBlock by clicking the whitelist button in the popup while a whitelist directive you handcrafted is in effect, your handcrafted whitelist directive will simply be commented out. This way you can bring it back to life if ever you un-whitelist by mistake.