The system tray

AdBolish lives in the system tray, next to the clock. You can control it from there without opening the window.

The tray menu

Right-click the tray icon:

• The status line, for example Protection on · 1,204 blocked today, Paused (4 min left), or Paused: bandwidth sharing is off.
• Protection: tick or untick to turn blocking on or off.
• Pause for 5 minutes and Pause for 1 hour.
• Something broken? Allow a site… opens Fixing a broken site.
• Open AdBolish.
• Share idle bandwidth: tick or untick to turn sharing on or off. The line under it says Utilities available or Utilities disabled while sharing is off. See Bandwidth sharing.
• Settings… and Check for updates….
• Quit AdBolish.

The tray icon changes while protection is off or paused, and its tooltip repeats the status line. Left-click the icon to open the window.

Closing versus quitting

Closing the window only hides it; filtering continues. Quit AdBolish asks first, because quitting closes the app: it can't keep itself up to date and won't run in the tray until you launch it again. Your DNS keeps working through the protection service, but ad blocking pauses about two minutes after you quit (bandwidth sharing stops with the app). Your original DNS and browser settings come back when you uninstall.

What usually goes wrong

• Ticking Protection does nothing. Bandwidth sharing is off, so protection can't be turned on. Tick Share idle bandwidth first.
• The menu items are greyed out. AdBolish is still loading its blocklists, or couldn't start. The status line says which (Loading blocklists… or Not running: see dashboard).
• You can't find the icon. Windows may have tucked it into the hidden-icons overflow (the ^ arrow by the clock).