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Comment by pradn | Hacker News Reader

Question about pihole: is it possible to turn off blocking for a website? Do you have to log into the pihole web interface to do that? I often go to websites where some crucial functionality is blocked by my adblocker (ublock origin), where I have to turn it off for that site.

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I map the command below to a keyboard shortcut to disable all pihole blocking for 60 seconds via the pihole disable API call.

wget --quiet "http://PIHOLE_IP/admin/api.php?disable=60&auth=YOUR_API_TOKE..."

You can find the token in the pihole Web GUI at, Settings > API/Web Interface > Show API token

I just stop using sites that gimp themselves when I use an adblocker. There's tons of alternatives for most things.

How do you use the web when you can't click on links?

I can't effectively keep a mental black list of all the sites which I don't want to click on.

Very few sites are broken with ad blocking. If you click on one, you just press the back button. No need for a mental blacklist.

I don't. I mean, if it's a news site just search for the title in a search engine and you'll find other articles. If it's a web application I search for an alternative and bookmark that. If you really want to avoid even loading it, you can just block the whole site with your adblocker but I don't go that far.

That is what I currently do. It turns casual browsing into a frustrating scavenger hunt. The whole point of the web was to make links effortless so you could browse sites. This breaks that whole model.

There aren't always alternatives - think shopping for certain items, government forms.

Why would a site that hopes you'll send them money in exchange for product, refuse your traffic if you have an ad blocker enabled? That just costs them money. Same for government forms, why would they refuse your traffic if you're blocking ads?

I wonder, too. Yet I still see these issues.

It might not be intentional to break the site experience for adblock users - but there is a number of sites that has implemented link tracking in a way that overrides the normal click (though sometimes not keypress) events, to let the tracking code do its thing. If the tracking code is blocked or fails to load, that means a lot of actions break.

Best part? Trying to convince the operators of such sites that users they cannot see in their "analytics solution" are worth fixing their site for is not exactly a straightfoward job - from their narrow view, these users simply do not exist, because the tracking does not show them!

You have adds on your government forms?

Ad blockers have false positives.

It is not what GP asked.

An no, there isn't "tons of alternatives". In theory there is. But in practice, they can really make your life harder. Some may say that Signal is an alternative for WhatsApp, but if people you communicate with don't want to use anything but WhatsApp, then Signal is useless. I hate Facebook but when I want to plan an event, I found nothing better, simply because that's the platform that reaches the most people. Network effects... But also, your favorite show may not be on "alternative" streaming platforms, sometimes your job, or worse, the government may require a specific website.

There are extremists who are ready to find alternative friends, shows or jobs just to avoid using some website. It is a good thing these people exist, that's how progress is made. But for most people you have to make compromises.

> I hate Facebook but when I want to plan an event…

Ah! That's why I haven't missed Facebook. I am old enough that I don't plan events any longer.

(Or maybe I have no social life. Actually, that's right, I don't. ;-))

Yes, you can do that via whitelist/blacklist: https://docs.pi-hole.net/guides/misc/whitelist-blacklist/

You can whitelist yes, or there's an option to disable the entire thing temporarily for x minutes.

Yes you have to log in to the interface unless you engineer a way around it

On iOS there is an app called piHoleRemote that had a nice widget that allows you to disable pihole for x minutes.

Can be nice to use to quickly disable pihole to get through to a particular website.

Yes, you have to login to disable but you could easily use the API. For instance, pihole.disable(60) with https://pypi.org/project/PiHole-api/

My solution to this is using Cloudflare Warp (Cloudflare's consumer-facing VPN).

When I need to access ads.google.com or analytics.google.com for my company, I turn on Cloudflare, and pihole is bypassed.

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