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How well does Pi-Hole work for people who aren't technical? My family member gets aggravated when ad blocking breaks a site for them

temp8964 5y ago
I never had a legitimate site breaks by pi-hole. Pi-hole should be the easiest for family members, they don’t need to do anything at all. On most sites, it simply leaves a blank space in where ad supposed to be.
slivanes 5y ago
I found the most frustration came from links in emails not working as intended. For some reason many companies, government agencies, and schools use metrics tracking on emails. Pi-hole has a nice temporarily disable blocking feature on its dashboard to help in those cases. Simple click to whitelist is also available.
joshschreuder 5y ago
It’s probably not ideal tbh. You can whitelist stuff that’s blocked, but it involves logging into the admin console and whitelisting either manually or via a recently blocked request, easy enough for techies but I wouldn’t back it for non techies. I use a fairly aggressive Pihole list that breaks stuff reasonably often, there may be less strict lists which are “safer” in this regard.
dpritchett 5y ago
Pihole frequently breaks online tv like Disney+ and Hulu when viewed on our Roku TV. Preload trackers or ads get stuck and the show will never start.
- SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
  I’ve never used pihole, but I’m assuming you could whitelist the Roku’s local ip?
  - input_sh 5y ago
    Of course you can.
satysin 5y ago
Some sites breaking was a complaint my wife had when I set all devices on our network to use the pi-hole. To solve this I setup a Shortcut on her iPhone so she can simply say "hey siri, stop pi-hole" and it will turn off the pi-hole for 5 minutes using a simple web request. The pi-hole turns itself back on after 5 minutes. A bookmark works just as well but she prefers to use Siri as she never remembers where the bookmark is lol. It is mostly on her phone anyway that something doesn't quite work right so Siri was the best solution. I also have Wire Guard setup and our phones configured to connect to it always for mobile data and unknown wifi so all our connections are routed via our home internet connection and via the pi-hole. As I have stupidly fast home internet (10Gbit EPON with free.fr) it works fantastically.

temp8964 5y ago

I never had a legitimate site breaks by pi-hole. Pi-hole should be the easiest for family members, they don’t need to do anything at all. On most sites, it simply leaves a blank space in where ad supposed to be.

slivanes 5y ago

I found the most frustration came from links in emails not working as intended. For some reason many companies, government agencies, and schools use metrics tracking on emails. Pi-hole has a nice temporarily disable blocking feature on its dashboard to help in those cases. Simple click to whitelist is also available.

joshschreuder 5y ago

It’s probably not ideal tbh. You can whitelist stuff that’s blocked, but it involves logging into the admin console and whitelisting either manually or via a recently blocked request, easy enough for techies but I wouldn’t back it for non techies. I use a fairly aggressive Pihole list that breaks stuff reasonably often, there may be less strict lists which are “safer” in this regard.

dpritchett 5y ago

Pihole frequently breaks online tv like Disney+ and Hulu when viewed on our Roku TV. Preload trackers or ads get stuck and the show will never start.

SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
I’ve never used pihole, but I’m assuming you could whitelist the Roku’s local ip?
- input_sh 5y ago
  Of course you can.

satysin 5y ago

Some sites breaking was a complaint my wife had when I set all devices on our network to use the pi-hole. To solve this I setup a Shortcut on her iPhone so she can simply say "hey siri, stop pi-hole" and it will turn off the pi-hole for 5 minutes using a simple web request. The pi-hole turns itself back on after 5 minutes. A bookmark works just as well but she prefers to use Siri as she never remembers where the bookmark is lol. It is mostly on her phone anyway that something doesn't quite work right so Siri was the best solution. I also have Wire Guard setup and our phones configured to connect to it always for mobile data and unknown wifi so all our connections are routed via our home internet connection and via the pi-hole. As I have stupidly fast home internet (10Gbit EPON with free.fr) it works fantastically.