The classic Plucky experience

Good to the last drop

If you didn’t already know, Plucky is an internet filter known for its high-level customizability and difficulty to bypass. Since Plucky offers a ton of customizability options across its various features, the learning curve can be steep as a brand new user with no guidance.

That’s why this guide exists. Its purpose is to walk you through the basics you need to learn to start using Plucky immediately while putting in minimal effort initially. At the same time, the basic stuff you learn will actually benefit you more than anything else and you may not even need to learn any of the advanced stuff afterwards.

Think of it like a Plucky Pareto principle; 80% of the reward comes from just 20% of the learning effort.

So for the new user’s gentle (yet super-effective) learning curve, you only need to learn 5 things:

1. Use the classic config as your base so that most of the work is immediately done for you
2. Keep your delay at 5 seconds for the first two days using Plucky
3. When a site you frequently use is blocked, allow it!
4. If a site (or a part of a site) you’ve allowed becomes problematic, revoke it!
5. Learn how to allow programs and then turn on the system feature

Some of these terms like config and delay are probably foreign to you. That’s okay! Soon you’ll understand what it all means when we look at the 5 points in detail.

How to install

If you haven’t already installed Plucky, do that first before continuing on.

See how-to-install .

Import the classic config

Now that you’ve got a brand new and unconfigured install of Plucky, the first thing you should do is import the classic config.

Visit https://u.pluckeye.net/configurations/28634 and click on the import button. Select your config ‘main’ from the dropdown and click Import.

The classic config is designed to act as a starting point by handling most blocking decisions for you. It blocks most images and videos across nearly all websites. This is important because the question isn’t ‘what should be blocked?’ but rather, what should be allowed through?

Plucky’s simple effectiveness is that it indiscriminately blocks images and videos, and puts the ball in your court to answer the question of what should be allowed through. Your university website? Your grandma’s Facebook page? The pizza shop down the road? You’re in charge of the whitelist; let classic config handle the blacklist.

Set your delay to 5 seconds

The delay is the most important Plucky setting and properly understanding how to use it will largely effect what you get out of Plucky.

Simply, the delay is the user-defined setting which tells Plucky how far into the future it should defer giving you the access you request. For example, if you want to unblock images on Google Search and you previously set your delay to 2 hours, Plucky will receive the configuration change requesting access to images on Google Search but it won’t actually become effective until 2 hours later.

Note that the delay only applies the first time you request access because you’re changing the configuration. Once the change takes effect it persists afterwards so that images on Google Search will always be allowed until you revoke the rule yourself. Also, the wording “giving you the access you request” is carefully selected to convey the point that the delay only applies to loosening the belt; if you instead wanted to tighten the belt (increase restrictions) those actions would skip the delay and become effective immediately.

Examples

+ allow image/ https://www.google.com    ## loosening change, waits the delay
- allow image/ https://www.google.com    ## tightening change, skips the delay
+ block image/ https://www.google.com    ## tightening change, skips the delay
- block image/ https://www.google.com    ## loosening change, waits the delay

How long should the delay be?

It might surprise you (or not) to hear that many Plucky users immediately set the delay to its maximum length (7 days) after installing for the first time.

The idea seems laudable–the user doing this is seeking the most protection possible, and being unable to make changes to the configuration seems like a surefire way to never access content he ultimately wants to avoid.

The problem with this method is it sets the user up for failure because he never learns how to use Plucky properly. How can he when most of his configuration actions are delayed so far into the future he can’t experiment with the customizability Plucky offers?

Imagine if the same user had a 5 second delay and a plan to use Plucky to control his compulsive social media use. He might start by creating a rule to block Facebook, but then decide it’s better for his goals to still be able to access his friends’ pages. He experiments with allowing some Facebook URLs while blocking most of the site, and test-drives this setup for a few days while making tweaks to it as he goes. At the end of his experiment he decides he’s found a setup that works with his goals to use social media more responsibly and increases his delay to 24 hours.

So, to answer the question posed by the section heading, the delay should be short (5 seconds) for the first few days using and customizing Plucky to fit with your goals. Then, once you’ve figured out what’s possible with Plucky and built a configuration that works well for you, increase the delay to be long–a few hours, a day, you decide!

How to change the delay from the settings

1. In your web browser, click on the Plucky extension icon
2. Click on “config” in the top-left
3. Click on the button that says delay: nil
4. Input 5 in the top field
5. Select the appropriate increment of time from the dropdown menu > seconds
6. Click the apply button to save the changes

Allow any sites you want that classic config blocks; personalize your config!

The classic config you imported earlier has already instructed Plucky on what kind of content it should be blocking. Now it’s time to personalize your Plucky configuration by whitelisting sites (or parts of sites) you want Plucky to ignore.

The easiest (and fastest) way to add a site to the whitelist is to visit it, click the Plucky extension icon, and click the button at the top of the page that looks like: allow sitename.com

The button is formatted automatically to show what it will do if you click on it. You can also change settings on this page to tweak the button before clicking on it, like clicking on the location dropdown and changing the host (sitename.com) to a URL (https://www.sitename.com/abc).

The effect would be that only https://www.sitename.com/abc would be whitelisted rather than all of sitename.com.

You can also change the action to block instead of allow if you wanted to block a site completely. Although we mentioned classic config has already pre-configured Plucky to block for you, that applies to blocking image and video on sites (which for most cases is as good as making a problematic site worthless). But if you find a site to be problematic even in text-only mode, you can use the block action to truly get rid of it.

If you click on advanced you will see more options to tweak even further.

Media type lets you specify if you just want allow/block image, video, or some other kind of media content on the site.

Schedule lets you specify if you want to allow the site temporarily. Clicking on other… from the dropdown lets you specify the time of day and days of the week you want your rule to be applicable.

Revoke rules that you no longer want

If you make a mistake while configuring and want to undo a rule, you can revoke it with the timeline tool.

1. Click the Plucky extension icon
2. Click on config in the top-left corner
3. Click on timeline to open the rule history

The timeline tool lets you see rules at a glance in order of recency as well as lets you use the search bar to narrow down the results.

When you find the rule you want to revoke, click on the  - del button beside it.

Tip: Remember that deleting rules can be subject to the delay! If you want to delete a block rule, it will wait out the delay before actually getting removed. If you want to delete an allow rule, that will skip the delay and take effect instantly.

Enable system and allow programs

The system feature is a switch that turns Plucky from a filter in your web browser into a filter for your whole computer.

You can enable it by doing the following:

1. Click the Plucky extension icon
2. Click on config in the top-left corner
3. Click the system: off button
4. Tick ✓ the enable box
5. Click the apply button

With system enabled, Plucky can filter other programs on the computer like Microsoft Office or Adobe Creative Suite. If you are looking for a fully locked down device, the system feature is for you.

But how will that work if you need some programs to be whitelisted by Plucky? The answer is: basically the same way you whitelist sites. The only difference is we will be using a different interface to create these allow rules.

Tip: If you are importing the classic config as advised in this guide, many common programs will ‘just work’ because they are pre-configured through the classic config. It’s good to know how to create your own program rules, but you also might not need to.

How to use the command line interface

If you are on Windows, the interface you will be using is called Command Prompt. On macOS, it’s called Terminal. Search for your platform’s interface using the Taskbar Search (Windows) or Spotlight (macOS). These programs come pre-installed with your computer; you don’t need to download or install anything.

1. Open Command Prompt / Terminal (referred to afterwards as the command line)
2. Open the program you want to create an allow rule for, such as Signal
3. In the command line, type pluck verdicts and press the Enter / return key
4. Panic at the incomprehensible output that just flooded your screen (just kidding)
5. See the screenshot below for a diagram of what the output means

Timestamp - the time the verdict was created

Action - either allow or block ; simply tells you whether the program was allowed or blocked

PID - the exact identifier of the process currently running on the computer–only useful to advanced users for troubleshooting situations

Program Name - the name of the program

IP Address:Port - the IP Address the program tried to connect to, and the port it attempted to use

the screenshot shows an example of an IPv4 Address; sometimes you might see an IPv6 address which looks like this: [2001:db8:3333:4444:5555:6666:7777:8888]

Rule - the most relevant rule Plucky found from the config to decide what action to take on the program (to allow or block it)

Here is an example output; try to figure out what it means:

What the verdict is saying is, “At approximately 2:48 PM, the program named Brave with the process identifier 15264 was allowed to connect to static.pluckeye.net at the IP address 159.23.142.193 using port 443 because of the existence of the rule allow pluckeye.net.”

Not all of this information is necessary most of the time. You could simplify the verdict down to just these parts and still find it useful:

Simply knowing what the program name is, what it wants to connect to, whether it’s allowed or blocked, and why, is usually all you care about for creating rules.

With that understanding, it’s time to actually create a rule.

Example allow a program

The program I want to use is called Signal, and the problem is whenever I launch it I get the “Offline - Check your network connection” message. I suspect Plucky is filtering it and I want to unblock it, so this is what I do.

1. Open the command line

2. Type pluck verdicts signal

   Tip: if you know the name of the program you want to focus on, you can add it like so to simplify the verdicts by only showing results for that program

3. The result looks like this:

   11:13:39.023 block 12000 signal.exe chat.signal.org 13.248.212.111:443 www
   11:13:58.541 block 9664 signal.exe updates2.signal.org [2606:4700:0:0:0:0:6812:1a2c]:443 www
   

   The program signal.exe is being blocked from connecting to chat.signal.org and updates2.signal.org. I can solve this in a couple of ways:

   • Make two allow rules for each web address being blocked
   • Make one allow rule to unblock the entire program

   Depending on the use-case, the former option could be better, but in this case I think the latter is better

4. Type pluck + allow program:signal

   Tip: the .exe is not necessary and best practice is to leave it off when creating a program rule

5. Wait out the delay.

   Tip: type pluck future to see pending changes and when they will become effective

6. Check that Signal now works (restart the program if necessary). If it doesn’t, repeat steps 1-5 and look for more blockages