Factorio Forums

"whitelist" and "blacklist" don't seem like the proper words for the deconstruction planner. "Whitelist" implies something you want and "blacklist" something you don't want. Except that the tool itself is used to remove unwanted stuff so it becomes a double negative and becomes really confusing.

So instead of "Filters: Whitelist - Blacklist" I suggest: "Select: matching - excepting".

I see your point, though I never had the problem myself.

I don't think of a blacklist as a list of "bad things" but a list of "things that don't get through this filter." And a Whitelist is "things that do get through this filter" instead of a list of "good things." No double-negative when looked at that way.

I think excluding would work better than excepting.

Pirion wrote:I think excluding would work better than excepting.

Agreed. I never could figure out how to get those filters to work. Eventually just gave up.

The implication of blacklist of bad things and whitelist as a thing of good things is in the dictionary. Extending it to "things that pass or don't pass a filter" is a stretch and that gets confusing.

• https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/blacklist
• https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/whitelist

I think this is one of those times where a common term is adopted by an industry and gains a specific meaning that varies from common usage in a significant way.
In computers, blacklists don't care if something is good or bad. They only care if a thing gets through the filter or not.
In any case I agree that other terms would be less ambiguous. Mostly here I'm trying to shed some light on why the terms were chosen and show that they are not wrong, just suboptimal.

The thing is that it's ambiguous as to the perspective you use.

Whitelist and blacklist could mean 'survives the deconstruction planner, doesn't survive the deconstruction planner' like you're describing a firewall.
Or it could mean 'deconstructed by the deconstruction planner, not deconstructed by the deconstruction planner' like you're describing a, I dunno, garbage pickup run.

I THINK it means the latter definition.