History

EasyList was created in Spring 2005 by Rick Petnel, better known in the community as rick752. His goal was to write a "simple, effective, easy to understand [and] easy to edit" subscription for the "Adblock" extension, which had been practically abandoned by the project owner, rue, and later for the forked derivative Adblock Plus. In January 2006 Wladimir Palant took over Adblock Plus development and in the following April the significant 0.7 release of the add-on was published. The major change was that large lists of simple rules were, for the first time, processed more effectively than regular expressions; EasyList consequently became the top recommendation within the extension because of its emphasis on comprehensible filters.

In November 2006 filters that removed web bugs were split from EasyList to form the affiliated "ABP Tracking Filter", now known as EasyPrivacy.

Development of the project continued steadily for several years, with EasyList attaining a user base of approximately four million by January 2009. Although not directly involved in the project as an EasyList author, Wladimir Palant was a big help during this early times and we cannot thank him enough for his always friendly and valuable support.

Rick then sadly passed away in April 2009 and Ares2, then author of EasyList Germany, agreed to take over his postion. In December of the same year Michael and Erunno became authors, and in Summer 2010 MonztA, previously author of the independent project "Filter von MonztA", and Khrin also joined the project at the request of Michael, who had recently become the lead author of EasyList and EasyPrivacy.

Famlam became an EasyList, EasyPrivacy and EasyList Germany author in September 2011, and soon afterwards MonztA took over from Michael as lead author.

On 17 May 2013 the merger with Fanboy's List was finally done after several months of manual optimisation and tweaking. Fanboy is also the main author since then.

Copyright

EasyList, EasyPrivacy, EasyList Germany, EasyList Italy and EasyList Dutch are dual licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike and the GNU General Public License. Website content, including images, blog posts and coding, is available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike. Material should be attributed to the person listed in the credits section or, in the event of no specific reference, "The EasyList authors (https://easylist.to/)". It is requested, but not required, that anyone who wishes to use the logo contacts the EasyList authors and does not use it to represent any other organisations without prior consent.

Credits

EasyList and EasyPrivacy authors

• fanboy
• MonztA
• Famlam
• Khrin

EasyList Germany authors

• MonztA
• Famlam
• Khrin

EasyList logo graphic artist

• Peewee
• Converted to SVG by Lain

Blog software

• Pelican