# Improved Link Filter

In December we introduced Link Filter for the first time in over a year after its removal. Link Filter is used by communities to protect against all kinds of spam or advertising related to unknown third party links.

With our state-of-the-art link parser, we are on par with the best in the industry. Today we are improving the user interface and extending the functionality of Link Filter to become even better.

# Improved URL matching

Previously, you could only use wildcards at the start and end of the URL, but not restricted to eg. only the path. This made it hard to write whitelisted URLs that aren't overly broad.

For example, *example.com/* could previously be used to allow example.com, and all of its subdomains. However, this would also allow evil.com/example.com, where the domain was used as path.

Now, with improved handling, we check the following parts of the URL individually:

• scheme (http/s, ftp, discord, etc)
• hostname (example.com)
• path (/helloworld.html)
• query string (?hi=true)

So, now *example.com/* will be treated as *://*example.com/* and the previous bypass is now no longer possible.

# Improved button UI

The Whitelist domain, Whitelist URL, Blacklist domain and Blacklist URL buttons have been replaced by two siple Whitelist and Blacklist buttons. Clicking on them will now display a modal where you can specify exactly what URL patter you want to white- or blacklist. (Replace the path with /* to get only domain-wide behavior)

After white- or blacklisting an URL, you will also be able to undo it.

Also buttons no longer expire after 3 days.

# Link Preview

You can now enable Link Previews in your Dashboard which will allow you to determine if a website is malicious without having to visit it yourself.

Please note websites that easily detect that a bot is making the request and block it or show a different page. For example, our own website cleanerbot.xyz is using advanced Cloudflare Firewall rules that are blocking the bot.