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 Wget 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. You'll need to create the folder yourself. 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 then copy and paste the following batch scripting into it to create the file:

When you're done, save this new file as "filter.bat" (without quotation marks) to TreeWalk's "etc" folder, 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 our filter.bat file instead and extract it from filter.zip (607 bytes).

What does it do? filter.bat will create three new files in Treewalk's "etc" folder: filter.bak will contain a copy of the downloaded file from yoyo.org, filter.old will become a backup of your old filter.conf and filter.log will maintain a record of the last download process...

So, 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 "filter.new" is not detected by "wget.exe", the batch file simply closes gracefully. Download speeds are also noted in the log file. In the event of a problem, you can always delete "filter.conf", rename "filter.old" back to "filter.conf" and restart TWDNS from the Start Menu icons to reinstate the previous filter.conf file.

That's it! Just create a shortcut to filter.bat somewhere handy, and double-click it every week or so to update your filter configuration. You can schedule a task to do this as an auto-update function as well, keeping in mind that you should only run it as often as the file is updated anyway.

No matter whether you choose to update your TreeWalk Ad Blocker manually or use the batch file, you won't be getting many 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. If you find you need an original copy of the filter.conf file, download filter.conf (229 bytes). If you need an unzipped copy of filter.bat, download unzipped filter.bat (984 bytes).