Wildcard support in Blokada

What are wildcards?

Some blocklists use wirdcards to block all subdomains for a domain. Wildcards look like this:

*.example.com

The asterisk (*) means that anything can replace it, and hence, in this example, any subdomain of the domain example.com will be blocked. Examples of domains that would be blocked:

news.example.com
something.else.example.com
example.com

Please note that the wildcard can only be placed as a prefix (before the domain), and only one wildcard is supported per entry.

Which versions of Blokada support wildcards?

Blokada 4 supports wildcards for a long while now. It needs to be manually activated under the Advanced Adblocking option menu. It supports adding blocklists with wildcards, or even adding your own entries with wildcards. Learn more about advanced adblocking here.

Blokada 5 for Android supports wildcards starting with v5.11. There is no need to enable this feature, it will be automatically enabled for blocklists that contain wildcards. Currently, the default blocklist (in v5.11) has wildcards, so this feature is automatically activated by default.

Blokada for ios supports wildcards as well. All you need to do is configure them over at app.blokada.org

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Just to clariffy…

If I have an entry looking like

*.example.com

will that just block all subdomains of example.com or also its root domain?

Meaning: if we want to block example.com and all of its subdomains, does the above suffice, or do we need an additional entry for the root domain like this…

example.com
*.example.com

You don’t need additional entry.
example.com will be blocked if you have *.example entry.
You can verify it on the activity tab

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Thank you. But practically testing it on Blokada/4.14 shows that seems to be incorrect — which is why I asked for clarification.

On v4 you need to explicitly activate the wildcards feature - double check you did.

Hi, is there any way to manually enter wildcard block lists in blokada latest 5.15.0 beta…?
I want to block all the requests to *.mxplay.com

I have searched all the options available in blokada and could not find any…

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Hi,
No, not yet.
Blokada v5 uses a different approach to implement wildcards. In v5 the blocklists can include wildcards but there is no possibility to add new wildcards manually yet :slight_smile:

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Any news on wildcard support within Blokada Cloud?

It’s on top of the list of features to add, it will be implemented soon :slight_smile:

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I’m pleased to announce that the feature is now available.
However it’s currently only available to configure this through app.blokada.org.

Navigate to Blokada Cloud → exceptions, then add wildcard entries such as *.example.com.
We will integrate the wildcard blocklists and make it more convenient to manage in the app a bit further down the road :slight_smile:

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Will this feature be available to the Libre version of Blokada as well?

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