YouTube Video Blocker EN

This addon provides video blocking functionality for YouTube.

Currently it works on Home, Subscriptions, Search pages and the Recommendations section.

You can block videos by their title, block specific videos directly, or block entire channels.

Addon can either leave a placeholder in place of a blocked video, or remove it completely, this is configurable in the Settings menu.

To block a specific video, simply right click on either video itself or its title, and select "Block Video".

To block by title, enter keywords that the addon will search for in the Settings menu. By default whole word matching is used - 'cat' matches only 'cat', won't match 'cats'. Wildcards are supported - * will replace any number of characters.
So for example, 'react*' will match 'reacts', 'reaction', 'reacting', etc.
You can test your rules directly in the Settings menu on the editable test titles using "Test Blocking" button.

To block a channel, you have a variety of methods:

• right click on either video itself or its title, and select "Block Channel"
• right click on the channel link, and select "Block Channel"
• go to the page of the channel you wish to block, right click anywhere, select "YouTube Video Blocker" -> "Block Channel"
• add the channel name manually in the "Channels Names" list in the Settings menu

Video blocking can be paused in the popup menu opened by clicking the toolbar addon icon. Settings menu is also accessed from there.

Additional options

• Remove Shorts - will remove all shorts from the same pages where video blocking is active. Removes them entirely, no placeholders. Will also redirect away from Shorts feeds back to regular Subscriptions.
• Remove Irrelevant Elements - removes irrelevant sections from search results like "From related searches", "Previously watched", "Channels new to you"
• Remove "You got X likes" notifications - removes these notifications, which are mostly useless and just clog up your notifications list
• Block clickbait / vague titles - attempts to block videos with titles that don't describe what the video is about, titles that use common clickbait phrases or multiple all caps words. Some examples of such titles: "This is crazy", "You wouldn't believe this!", "It's happening!", "This is how it ends...", "Don't fall for it", "It's insane" and so on.
  Works with English titles only, since it depends both on specific words/phrases and overall sentence structure. Don't enable this if you watch videos with non-English titles, as the results would be unpredictable! Videos blocked by this function have a distinct placeholder.
• Blocklist Storage Location - by default the sync storage is used, which allows you to sync data via your Firefox account. However, this storage is limited, and if you exceed it, you can now switch to local (non-synced) storage instead, which allows practically unlimited blocklists. When switching storage location, if there is any existing data in the new storage location, it will be merged with your current one.

Backup

• You can create manual backups of your blocklists, which will be saved as a .json files, as well as restore them.
• You can enable automatic backups - then the addon will automatically create hourly / daily / weekly / monthly backups in your default Firefox Downloads folder in '[YTVB-backups]'. It will retain the last 4 hourly backups, and 3 of each other category.
• If there are no changes in the backup data compared to the previous state for the same backup type, then its simply skipped.
• Addon uses Downloads history to track its backups. If you clear it, the addon will lose reference to existing backup files and won't be able to auto-delete them, so you'll need to remove them manually at some point if they aren't needed.

Other info

• When you delete more than 10% of any blocklist, it won't be auto-saved - this is meant to prevent accidentally wiping out your entire blocklist. To restore the previous state in such cases, simply reload the page.

Known bugs / Issues to fix

Limitations

• YT layout updates can and likely will break the addon's functionality, so if Google decides to update their YouTube UI again, the addon would need to be updated to work.

Permissions

• Access browser activity during navigation - needed to read the URL before navigation to another page, which in turn is used for auto-redirect away from the shorts page to the subscriptions page
• [Optional] Download files and read and modify the browser’s download history - used by the backup system, to automatically save local backup files
• [Optional] Access your data for sites in the *://youtube.com domain - not actually optional, must be enabled, required for the majority of the addon's functionality