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Comment by badbug | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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