bongochong
commented
8 months ago Thank you for the suggestions! There's a lot of work I intended to get done before doing another release - and I'm about halfway through with it - but many other responsibilities have gotten in the way, so the project is in maintenance mode for the time being. Most of your suggestions are not major, so I will implement them rather quickly. The only one I disagree with is using Steven Black's compiled hosts as a default source, simply because the other project I maintain, from which this one is derived, has essentially the same goals, but allows me to have more granular control over whitelisting, blacklisting, what sources are included etc... Though users can easily edit the scripts to include Steven Black's hosts list as a source, should they wish to do so.
Thanks again. I'll leave this issue open as a reminder, and to put some fire under my butt for completing the next release.
Thank you for making this useful tool available.
Some suggestions, based on my experience with the latest version of "Update Hosts (Standard)":
Add to the documentation, that it is possible to add your own custom hosts file entries, like this:
hosts.99.C:\Program Files (x86)\CWPUtilities\cwpumain\bin.Edit Configs > Hosts (Standard)to open the editor.busybox cat processing/hosts/hosts.* > processing/hosts/hosts-cat.final.copy hosts.99 processing\hosts.File > Savein the editor to save the change in the script.Another suggestion: Add the option to the program to use an ignore list, i.e. a user created text file with URLs that are blocked in one or more of the downloaded blocking lists, but which should not be blocked.
Some more suggestions:
For each of the files that are to be downloaded with
curl -s -o processing/hosts/hosts.*, check whether this file can be downloaded, and if not, display a warning.When the file
final-hosts.txthas been created, check the size of this file. If this file has a size of zero, abort the script with an error message that says that nothing could be downloaded (or something like that).When the hosts file in
C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etcis a read-only file, at the end of the script, this misleading message appears:Done! Your host file has been updated, while this is not the case. A few lines earlier it saysAccess is denied. 0 file(s) copied. I guess some people may overlook this earlier message. My suggestion is, to check first whether the hosts file is a read-only file, and if so, abort the script with an error message. (Or, as an alternative, if this is possible: Before trying to write to the hosts file, if needed, the script changes the read-only attribute of the hosts file, so writing to it is possible. When the hosts file was originally a read-only file, after writing to the hosts file, the script makes it a read-only file again.)With some firewalls or other security programs, it is possible to prevent modifications to the hosts file. When such a prevention has been set, at the end of the script, this misleading message appears:
Done! Your host file has been updated, while this is not the case. A few lines earlier it saysThe process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process. 0 file(s) copied. I guess some people may overlook this earlier message. My suggestion is, to check first whether the hosts file has been blocked by another program, and if so, abort the script with an error message.You may consider to add https://raw.githubusercontent.com/StevenBlack/hosts/master/hosts to the Defaults Hosts File Sources (and then remove the three sources "MVPS", "PGL Yoyo", and "URL Haus", because they then become duplicates, as they are included in the StevenBlack source).
NOTE: The link in the script to "URL Haus" (https://gitlab.com/curben/urlhaus-filter/raw/master/urlhaus-filter-hosts-online.txt), links to an old version of the "URL Haus" list, while the link in https://github.com/bongochong/CWP-Utilities/blob/master/MoreInfo/DefaultHostsLists.md links to the current version of the "URL Haus" list.