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Comment by badbug | Hacker News Reader

I tried pi-hole but my family couldn't make it work. Pihole blocks a lot of content they want to see, for example, email newsletters from our city gov. I understand why (privacy/tracking concerns) but it was just blocking too much and frustrating non-technical users in my house.

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A lot of these list maintainers put a lot of work into not breaking things, but their are just too many websites out their to know if a block breaks one of them or not. Send the list maintainer an email - or if they are on Github/Gitlab open a ticket and have a discussion. I think you'll find many of them are happy to remove breaking domains. Of course whitelist is always an option too if the list maintainer disagrees with the removal of a domain.

Also, there is a popular whitelist project for the Pi-Hole that can make it more user friendly: https://github.com/anudeepND/whitelist

I spoke directly with the pihole maintainers. They took a Hardline position that them blocking email from my city was the right thing to do because it used click tracking or some other metric gathering and was deemed a privacy risk.

I understand the devotion to a cause but it was too myopic for me.

As far as I know, the pi-hole maintainers do not maintain any of the default block lists. I maintain a list [1] that is then feed into the popular host list by Steven Black [2] - which is a default list.

I definitely do not want to break things for people and I'm happy to remove any reasonable domains from the list. I wouldn't consider google analytics a reasonable one to remove - but you get the idea. I hate to hear you had a bad experience of it. If my list had the breaking domains for you, I would of loved to have a ticket opened where we could discuss it. Sometimes it isn't clear cut between ads & tracking and useful services.

[1] https://github.com/lightswitch05/hosts

[2] https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts

As commented below, we don't actually maintain any of the lists, so that wasn't us you spoke to!

You can configure the lists that you use to suit your needs. You can also whitelist any domains that you need. It's up to you what you ultimately block!

Yes, it was. In fact, I think it was you personally, lol.

Hmmm, not sure I recall. Mind linking back to the conversation? Point is, we don't choose what domains are blocked or not, so there is nothing we can do except ship with a default whitelist. But we're not going to do that either, if we were to start doing that... what's to say we wouldn't whitelist something more nefarious.

It's safest for us, and our reputation, to stay out of the finer points of the actual blocked/not domains and instead defer to individual list maintainers who make that their business.

Can't find it, it may have been on chat.

But I did find a very similar request here with a work around: https://www.reddit.com/r/pihole/comments/49ckht/feature_requ...

So I understand you don't control the lists, but you do control the oobe and it seems like it might not be working for some people.

That post is 2 years old, and the op understood and was ok with the outcome...

Oobe is either 1)leave suggested defaults as is 2)don't use those lists.

Option 2 is available in the installer before you're even up and running. There is only so much hand holding we can do, to be fair. We have an extensive support community, and plenty of documentation, and yes, whilst I agree some users may fall between the cracks, the majority are able to find a solution to their problems.

There is no doubt that pihole works for some people. I'm just giving my honest review: it didn't work for me. It blocked too much. I asked for guidance and got a lecture about privacy.

And I did find a solution, just not with you product :)

Don't they have some kind of whitelist you can use?

Yes, they do. This story is very inaccurate.

You can whitelist but it isn't easy for non-technical users and becomes a huge chore.

And this story is 100% accurate. I'll try and find it.

I found the same thing with emails sent from an airline. It was frustrating because I did actually want to follow the links in the emails as they were to do with a flight I was taking.

You can whitelist domains, you can add to the blacklist or you can temporarily disable pihole (5-10min whatever) while you do something.

Yup, I temporarily disabled it and life was good.

But I can understand how this would frustrate people, especially when they don't know how to disable it or aren't given the password.

What about WS2811s with a pushbutton to temporarily disable, or a pushbutton on one of the GPIO pins, with the switch in a central location?

The included dashboard with the pi-hole is incredibly easy to use, so I just have it bookmarked on all our browsers in case someone in my family needs to pause it or whitelist/blacklist a site. We barely ever have to touch it though, mostly just to update the blocklists occasionally.

I was thinking use-cases for house guests or very non-technical folks (what is a bookmark?).

Arcade button[0] mounted on the RPi that initiates the 5 minute pause script?

[0]https://www.adafruit.com/product/1185

Yes!!!

Guest wifi network which doesn’t go through the pi?

Yes you can. But having non-technical people verbalize the need to whitelist a domain is incredibly painful.

That's interesting. There's another comment further down saying it broke stuff too, but I've honestly never had that happen. The most I've ever seen it "break" anything was formatting issues when people didn't declare the ad div size.

To be fair, we're very light/casual web users as most of my hobbies/entertainment are physical electronics and my wife/kids mostly watch Netflix/Stan or just browse reddit/news sites.

I'm sure there's plenty of stuff it breaks (due to how it works and how complex modern sites/web-apps can be), I've just been lucky that all of the sites we use seem to work fine.

> The most I've ever seen it "break" anything was formatting issues when people didn't declare the ad div size.

Haha, I remember some years back a popular C++ programming site would break if you didn't have an adblocker because someone had put wide header banner ads in both of the side banner areas, shrinking the text to a single word column in the middle. I guess they only tested their website with adblockers on...

They may be suffering in silence. Ask them if any sites or emails seem broken.

I'm very curious why it would block city gov. I've been running it for over a year on my server and I have not heard a peep out of any family members complaining about not reaching anything.

A lot of newsletters use click tracking. These scripts are blocked with a full block list, making everything unusable. It's often affiliate stuff and the newsletters that do this stuff

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