Permissible简介

This free extension aims to be a site blocker offering more flexibility regarding permissions than every other offering on the store. By doing so, users should find it easier to stick to the blocker’s restrictions.

One of the main issues I had with other site blockers was that I always ended up finding legitimate reasons to temporarily deactivate them. Blanket blocking sites would work for a period of time, but grew annoying when my friends wanted to watch Netflix. Blocking sites based on time of day was a step in the right direction, but was ultimately limited by the fact that on rare occasions my work would require me to use usually unproductive sites throughout the day. Example: I use YouTube mostly to kill time, so YouTube was naturally a good candidate to get blocked. However, every once in a blue moon, I also use YouTube to watch tutorials on cooking, installing bikes, and running Docker. Waiting until after 5PM to do all this stuff is a pain.

The result of these inconveniences is that we will often “temporarily” disable or edit our blocker settings to something more permissive. But it’s hard to stick to a restriction if you get in the habit of taking it down. Also, it’s easy to forget to re-enable a restriction once it turns off. A good site blocker should discourage people from disabling it by making rules easy to follow. It should limit our access to unproductive sites, but make it easy for us to use them on the rare occasions where we genuinely need or deserve to. This extension achieves this in the following ways:

-Providing the option to issue warnings for sites instead of hard blocking them. If you choose to make the YouTube “warn only”, users will be redirected to a warning page upon visiting YouTube. Here they can affirm that they are using YouTube for good reasons and choose to temporarily allow YouTube to be visited for the next 5, 30, or 120 minutes. I also found this useful for Reddit.
-Providing the option to only allow sites based not only on time of day, but day of week and day of month. Things such as manga and TV shows have new releases every week or every month. This setting saves you from constantly hitting refresh at the Rick and Morty home page. You can also use blocker restrictions to consume your serialized media in a single monthly blast instead of weekly dribs and drabs, though this requires more self control than most people possess.
-Allowing permissions to be combined together. Sometimes I want sites to be accessible either at 11:30-13:00, 17:00-23:59, or on weekends. The blocker allows you to do this.
-Lastly, it allows you to simply hard block a site. Because some sites really aren’t ever worth visiting.

By increasing the flexibility of its permissions, the blocker aims to make itself as non intrusive as possible. Set up your rules once, and never change them again.