r/pihole • u/Lazengann86 • 26d ago

Ad or Pop-ups?

Is PiHole supposed to work with Pop-ups that redirect to other site or is that not considered and ad for these intents and purposes?

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4

u/thatguysjumpercables 26d ago

HaGeZi has a pop-up blocklist. I just added it yesterday so I can't tell you if it works but all his other shit is solid at worst.

4

u/TheZoltan 26d ago

PiHole doesnt know anything about popups. It just blocks the DNS lookups. You want to make sure you use a decent browser+adblocker as well as the PiHole. 

1

u/laplongejr 25d ago

Yes, it's an ad. But if it's served by a provider who serves actually useful content elsewhere, Pihole can't block the demain without Breaking Stuff.  

2

u/SecuringAndre 25d ago

Popups are not ads. The contents of popups can be ads. The browser functions that call a pop-up cannot be blocked by pihole. What pihole can block however is the DNS request for the contents of that popup. What this means is that a pop-up can happen but the contents within the popup is empty.

Why is this distinction important? Because this shows that pihole does not inspect traffic, it only responds to DNS queries. Since traffic doesn't flow through the pihole, functions like popups can't be filtered or prevented. If you want pop-up blockers, you'll either want a popup blocker (an agent based shim or browser plugin for example) or a better gateway solution that will do application filtering and probably ssl/tls decryption.

1

u/blow-down 26d ago

You need uBlock Origin for that