The flee and blot actions can be given more or less weight by specifying a score with the rule. If not explicitly specified in a flee or blot rule, the score for that rule is 1.0.
The score should generally be 1 divided by the number of times the term should appear on the page to warrant a blot or flee. So, for example, a score of 0.9 means the word “sketchy” can appear once on the page without being blocked, as long as it doesn’t appear in a really important place such as the url of the page. A score of 0.1 means the term can appear on the page 9 times without provoking a blot.
Users are not advised to make heavy use of these scores as their meaning may change in the future.
Examples
To remove images from all web pages that contain at least 3 instances of the word donut or a single instance of the phrase biscuits and gravy, and that aren’t explicitly allowed using other Plucky rules:
pluck + blot score 0.34 word donut
pluck + blot word biscuits and gravy
To flee all web pages that contain 10 instances of words that are either sausage or bacon:
pluck + flee score 0.1 word sausage
pluck + flee score 0.1 word bacon
Block sites based on url keywords only
As briefly alluded to above, even low scoring words will still flee a page if the word is found in the url.
This can be used to achieve something akin to basic pattern blocking in hostnames and urls.
pluck + flee score 0.01 word bad
Here’s how the following example pages would be affected:
https://example.com # not blocked
https://example.com/bad # blocked
https://badexample.com/ # not blocked
https://bad.com/example # blocked
https://badminton.com # not blocked
https://badminton.com/bad-plays # blocked
The pages which are affected by the flee rule are the ones where the word ‘bad’ can be clearly parsed out.
The Plucky engine reads ‘badminton’ and ‘badexample’ as different words from ‘bad’. But ‘bad-plays’ is read as two words separated by a hypen, and one of those words is a match, so the url is blocked.
Last updated: 2026-08-06