I’ve been using GW for a while now and I really love it so far, but it has a bad time with its rules piling up.
This isn’t actually an active problem. There aren’t any inherent side-effects, but I use CCleaner to clean my system and by now any time I run it it removes over 800 registry entries and all of them are GW rules.
I don’t know if those are all the rules within my GW or if there’s some kind of a “bleeding” bug that makes GW create duplicate registry entries, but even if it’s safe it might make managing rules hard when the random installers and old versions of apps just pile up.
So I’d like to bring up the idea to add a garbage collection function where GW could scan its rules and filter them by things like “file missing” or “inactive since insert number days” and give the option to remove selected apps from that list en masse.
I’m an IT guy so I can imagine that this might be a resource hungry process if there are a lot of rules especially when they pile up like mine, but that’s why I’d prefer this to be a manual tool where we could set our own parameters and not have to wade through the unsorted AND poorly tagged(no “last active date” info for inactive apps) list deleting things one by one getting prompted with “Are you sure?” messages all the time.
This was just my first idea and while I was writing it I realized that it would work better as an option to add a new list(OR just re-work the current list to enable things like this) that could be sorted/filtered by all kinds of variables(missing, last used, name, folder, publisher, etc.) and let people perform actions on selected ones in groups, but if I could get a dedicated garbage collection option I’d already be happy.
GlassWire already has kind of a “garbage collection”. On the Firewall tab you will start to see “inactive apps” then if you mouse over those words you will see a small “x” to the right. If you click that “x” it will clear your inactive apps.
We use best practices with the Windows Firewall API and all GlassWire rules are separately grouped under the “GlassWire” group. Having rules should not cause any resource usage issues.
Please note if you keep GlassWire’s firewall set to “Off” it will not touch the Windows Firewall API at all and it will make absolutely no rules there.
I see you’re asking that we auto-delete rules from the Windows Firewall API. I’ll share this idea with our team and see if it can be done in a safe way that meets best Windows Firewall API usage best practices. It may also be possible we already do this, I am not sure. Thanks for your feedback.
Also if you use CCleaner please white list the “programdata/glasswire” directory, otherwise your paid status may be deleted by CCleaner.
Yes, I know, I actually mentioned that with saying how the “inactive apps” have no proper tags about when were they last active and I also mentioned that using the X to remove apps is just fine and even elegant, but not 800 times fine since for every app the user needs to click on the X then on the popup to make sure it’s not a false click.
Not to mention when someone has several versions of an app since updates change the filename instead of the internal version attribute of the EXE(that’s actually quite a lot of apps) they also have to check the version of said entries by hovering over each for a second until they can find the latest one in case it’s something that’s rarely used and not managed by the user like a background updater.
Thank you, it’s nice to know that all rules are grouped off properly.
Yeah I guess that would be the best option for say updates or installing new things, but it’s just not something that pops into the users mind each time OR even when something happens in the background, but yes that’s good to remember.
OH NO! Not auto-delete. Definitely not that. That can backfire way too easily.
The current manual system is perfectly safe. It just needs some quality of life functionality like AT LEAST an option to select multiple entries/apps for a single command.
So even if we forget filtering and better “tagging”(I’m calling it tagging since I don’t know how to call adding version numbers and last active attributes to the list in English.) within the list a user should be able to use something like Ctrl+Click or Shift+Click to select multiple things and then say issue a single delete/analyze/block command that only asks “Are you sure…” a single time with the number of selected apps and then just deletes them all.
That could even be a background process that removes them one by one using the current process just to keep it safe and more manageable within the code.
Oh, that is odd. I’ve been using CCleaner way before I even heard of GW and I’m also using it regularly and haven’t experienced a single problem other than this odd 800 “Invalid firewall rule” that it keeps bringing up.
Thank you for the reply. Hope something like this can be worked out.
