description of Subscription Policies

[myrdd]

on chrome://requestpolicy/content/settings/subscriptions.html the english text currently is:

Subscription policies are sets of rules maintained by us with help from the community. These rules are updated automatically and aim to minimize website breakage while blocking requests that impact your privacy.

I suggest to change it:

Subscription policies are sets of rules maintained by us with help from the community. You can subscribe to different rulesets which for example aim to minimize website breakage while blocking or block requests that impact your privacy. All subscriptions you subscribe to are updated automatically from there. You are very welcome to help us maintain the lists.

What do you think? Suggestions?

Edit: The identifier of the string in the *.properties files is subscriptionPoliciesDefinition. Besides the english version, there are only italian and chinese translations of the text.

[myrdd]

Maybe we can take parts of the subscription repo readme.

[drzraf]

~~While for personal use there's "one policy: the one of the user", subscriptions are another story. Some use RequestPolicy for "privacy-based" restrictions, others to have a website lighter to load (from connection POV or from widget POV) and doing what GreaseMonkey/Stylish do not permit. Following discussion in ticket #339 the way to design it will hugely affect file-format and subscriptions.~~

Eg: 1 JSON file, rules having an attributes, eg: policy: (privacy-hard|privacy-soft|no-ads|no-dynamics|no-clutter) We clearly see that getting privacy is often a tradeoff between "features" of site and usability, a one rules could exclude some domains and increase privacy, but remove feature, but this feature is only useful for registered (while other does not use the feature). Even such granularity of attributes will not fit the needs of users.

Moreover this JSON file will grow-up up to contains kilos of rules useless for most users. If a free-text strings appears in this file (eg: comments/description), they will be translated in many languages adding to the file size (see firefox extensions metadata).

Lets know think subscription as a "pool" of rules where users grabs some of them as a basis to improve to their specific needs. Rules can then be splitted (on the server and on the client). On the client, a policies.d/.json directory allow best practices in rules managing especially if there are namespaces, eg: user-.json, sub-*.json, ... One can put rules under VCS, compare, diff, add, drop, rules by simply managing file on a filesystem.

About splitting on the server, it's not as powerful as a JSON attribute and depends on whether the classification is adapted: - splitting according to policy type (privacy, ads, ...) - splitting according to website importance (top10, top100, ...)

Flexibility in policies is a must-have, but avoid cluttering with thousands of useless rules seems to be the n°2 priority of the subscription management system.

[nodiscc]

Moreover this JSON file will grow-up up to contains kilos of rules useless for most users

See https://github.com/RequestPolicyContinued/requestpolicy/issues/339#issuecomment-62823605

[nodiscc]

@myrdd I updated the subscriptions README. I think this issue is really a duplicate of #333. Maybe we can borrow some text from the README, and put it on chrome://requestpolicy/content/settings/subscriptions.html ?

Subscription policies are preset rules maintained by the community. These rules are updated automatically and can fulfil different needs, such as blocking known web browsing tracking sites, or allowing requests to allow certain sites to display/work properly. You can learn more about subscriptions at https://github.com/RequestPolicyContinued/subscriptions/

We should remove previous translations if the english text is changed.

@drzraf please keep this issue about description of Subscription Policies. I've put your comment in strikethrough as it's not related.

[myrdd]

The text you propose @nodiscc seems ok, but I'd remove the first "certain", see:

Subscription policies are preset rules maintained by the community. These rules are updated automatically and can fulfil different needs, such as blocking known web browsing tracking sites, or allowing certain requests to allow certain sites to display/work properly. You can learn more about subscriptions at https://github.com/RequestPolicyContinued/subscriptions/

IMHO it's a good idea to display the url itself (as it is now), what do you think?

We should remove previous translations if the english text is changed.

Yes, I'll do that. It's just italian and chinese.

[nodiscc]

remove the first "certain"

Yeah, typo from typing too quick/not re-reading.

it's a good idea to display the url itself (as it is now)

Yes.

[nodiscc]

It would be better to point to the "Subscriptions" paragraph that will be included in the website, on the "How to use" page (I'm currently working on it). The paragraph itself will have a link to the subscriptions repo.

I'll close the attached pull request and we can fix this when the website is updated.

[myrdd]

It would be better to point to the "Subscriptions" paragraph that will be included in the website, on the "How to use" page (I'm currently working on it)

@nodiscc I am going to take your description from above and link to the subscriptions repo. As soon as the website is ready, we can change that link. So now the text will be:

Subscription policies are preset rules maintained by the community. These rules are updated automatically and can fulfil different needs, such as blocking known web browsing tracking sites, or allowing requests to allow certain sites to display/work properly. Learn more about subscriptions.

Is this ok @nodiscc? May I close this issue then?

[nodiscc]

Ok! I updated https://github.com/RequestPolicyContinued/requestpolicy/issues/445 with current info on the website