Ad Blocker Updater

TreeWalk blocks ads from known Ad Servers with the help of a well-maintained list available from Peter's site at "yoyo.org". This page is intended to help you to create a batch file that will update your TreeWalk Ad Blocker with the file from Peter's site, using the help of GNU's wget project (a separate link is provided below to download the W32 package for Windows).

First things first. You already have TreeWalk set up to block Ad Servers from following the instructions on the Ad Server Blocking page of our site, so in addition to this next batch file you will need to obtain a copy of "wget.exe" for Windows. You can download it directly from this wget.exe download link. For the batch file we'll use, you'll want to extract the wget package to a folder called "wget" (no quotes) on your (C:) drive. Use any name or location you like if you're willing to edit the path, otherwise, stick with "c:\wget" for simplicity.

Create the batch file. Open Notepad or your favorite text editor and paste the following into the empty window to make the batch file (you'll need to make a crucially important edit for the Universal Resource Locator in "long URL" after that):

@echo off
if exist filter.old goto START
rem --- no old file, let's create it
echo. >filter.old
:START
rem --- download a fresh copy from "yoyo"
c:\wget\wget -N -nd -a filter.log -O filter.new long URL
rem --- see if we have a new copy
fc /L /C filter.new filter.conf >NUL 2>&1
if errorlevel 1 goto COPY
goto QUIT
:COPY
rem --- save old file and replace with new one
copy filter.conf filter.old >NUL 2>&1
copy filter.new filter.conf >NUL 2>&1
net stop TWDNS
net start TWDNS
:QUIT
rem --- all done, exiting
exit

IMPORTANT! Note that in this HTML example the "c:\wget\wget -N..." line with the long URL would wrap badly within this layout, so we've omitted the actual locator. You'll need to replace "long URL" with the actual URL itself (the web page address). This also gives you a chance to test the link (just right-click it and select "Copy shortcut" or whatever your preferred browser uses or follow it and copy the target URL from the Address bar). Be sure to paste the real URL all on the same line following the "c:\wget\wget -N -nd -a filter.log -O filter.new " arguments (note the space; it must be included before the URL).

When you're done, save this new file as "filter.bat" (without the quotation marks of course), making sure you have Windows set to show file extensions so you don't inadvertently name it as "filter.bat.txt". It will not work if this happens. If you get stuck, you can always download this example filter.bat file (filter.zip - 473 bytes) but test the URL above anyway and edit filter.bat if required.

What does it do? filter.bat will create three new files in Treewalk's "etc" folder: filter.new will contain a copy of the downloaded file from yoyo.org, filter.old will backup your old file and filter.log will create a log of the download history. When filter.bat is activated, it will check for the presence of filter.old and create one if the file is not found. It will then append the download procedure to the filter.log file if a connection state is established with the yoyo.org site. If a more recent file is detected, it is copied to filter.new and overwrites filter.conf after backing it up to filter.old. TreeWalk then stops and restarts to use the new "Ad Server Blocking" file and exits. If a newer version is not detected, the batch file simply closes gracefully. Download speeds are also noted in the log file.

That's it! Just create a shortcut to filter.bat somewhere handy, and double-click it every week or so to have TreeWalk update your Null Zone File. You can schedule a task to do this as an auto-update function as well, keeping in mind that you shouldn't need to run it every day because updates aren't issued that often. Also keep in mind that a shortcut placed in any Startup folder is not a great idea either because this could potentially cause errors.

Also note that if you update your "filter.conf" file with the script and open "filter.conf" afterwards, you'll notice the format looks different from the plain text output on Peter's page. This is normal -- just copy and paste the strange looking text into your text editor to see what it does.

No matter whether you choose to update your TreeWalk Ad Blocker manually or use the batch file, you won't be getting any more pesky ads displayed from large server farms that may potentially disrupt your surfing pleasure or try to glean any information from your computer!

If you have additional questions regarding this topic, please post them in our "config.discuss" forum.