Does publishers_list include inactive / expired publishers as well?

I see the following two publishers (web site) in a recent publishers_list:

["mallforafrica.com",false,true,{}]
["clickforafrica.org",true,false,{}]

For the first one, MallForAfrica.com, Brave browser shows “Not yet verified”.

The second one, ClickForAfrica.org, Brave browser shows “Brave Verified Publisher”.

The difference between the two entries is that the values in the entry are “false, true, {}” for the “Not yet verified”, and “true, false, {}” for the “Brave Verified Publisher”.

My questions are:

  • What are these three attributes (e.g., “true, false, {}” for a web site publisher?
  • What causes a publisher to have their entry go from having “true, false, {}” values to “false, true, {}”?
  • If these are inactive / expired / suspended, why are they simply not just removed from the list rather than included in a file that gets pulled periodically (e.g., every 48 hours) by every active brave browser user?

cc @asad @Mattches on this

Hi there @sgornick -

@cory or @nejczdovc could answer this one for ya :slight_smile: Tagging them now!

2 Likes

Hey there! Sorry for the delay

  • What are these three attributes (e.g., “true, false, {}” for a web site publisher?
  • What causes a publisher to have their entry go from having “true, false, {}” values to “false, true, {}”?
  • If these are inactive / expired / suspended, why are they simply not just removed from the list rather than included in a file that gets pulled periodically (e.g., every 48 hours) by every active brave browser user?

Those three attributes have to do with whether or not that website is included in auto-contribute or not.

The first attribute is the channel identifier, the second one is if the channel is verified or not, and the third one is if the verified channel should be included in auto-contribute.

We have a set list of sites that we’ve excluded - mostly sites that we’ve pulled from the Alexa top sites that were deemed “services” or “financial” that would be gaining revenue already through subscriptions, business, etc. The logic behind it being that your bank doesn’t need BAT for it’s services because you already pay the bank. Right now these are hardcoded but we have plans in the future to use the Alexa sites API to determine which categories to automatically exclude and to extend it to include non-english based geographies.

You can read the code for how we build our channels JSON here.

Hi Cory,

Thank you for your response.

the second one is if the channel is verified or not

If it is not verified, why is it even in the list? The publishers_list has grown to 51MB and those provide no utility, right? i.e., Wouldn’t being Not Verified also mean ineligible for receiving auto-contrubute? And thus no need to be included in the list?

the third one is if the verified channel should be included in auto-contribute.

So it appears that flag is whether the entry is excluded from auto-contribute. That makes sense now.

I appreciate your help.

Those are added in when the site is on the excluded list, but has not signed up to be a Brave Verified Publisher :slight_smile:

Yes! Apologize for the mistake. :sweat_smile:

Also the channels endpoint is 51 MB, but we serve it in a GZip format which reduces the size by 85% and leaves us with a 7.5 MB membory endpiont

In the future we’re going to be looking at introducing protobuf or something similar to transport these large JSON endpoints down to the client.

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