Ad blocking not effective

I use an ad blocking extension on my laptop. However on my android phone I haven't found a way to install the same extension and the YouTube app doesn't support such a thing either.

Since pi.hole was inserted into our network I have noticed only frustration not improvement regarding blocking ads. I have opened webpages on my phone that still have all the ads showing on the page. The Google search results all have the ads listed at the top of the results. The only difference is that I cannot visit the links to the ads I get a connection refused type page instead. This is incredibly frustrating that I cannot visit the page but still see the ads. I have to manually input the url to the page i want to go to instead of going through the redirect stage by clicking or tapping goes. Basically if the page has a redirect to another domain I'm blocked from being able to go to the page. And as i said my software extension ad blocker is doing it's job on my desktop just fine. I see nothing being blocked visually only my ability to navigate to the page in the ad. And some sites I'm blocked from going to irrelevant of whether I manually input the url or not. I couldn't access an obituary for my dead friend that was written by the Ottawa Citizen online version of their newspaper articles. My roommate is responsible for whitelisting such issues but he's out most of the day. I'm failing to appreciate the benefits of using this pi.hole as it only blocks your ability to visit pages not block the ads like it's supposed to do. It acts more like a parental control system that is used to stop children from accessing adult content online like porn or violence etc... It seems possible that it may be that my roommate does not know how to set up the device properly. Because it sucks at actually blocking ads.

Anyway I would like to know if it is doing what it's designed to do by only blocking your ability to go to the page an ad is erm advertising or if it's setup wrong and it should be blocking the ad from being shown like the adblocker extensions do for browsers like Firefox or Chrome etc... it seems odd that it would curb access to places that are advertised not the advertisement itself.

Please upload a debug log and post just the token URL that is generated after the log is uploaded by running the following command from the Pi-hole host terminal:

pihole -d


or do it through the Web interface:

Tools > Generate Debug Log

Ah, I realise you are the one with the roommate installing Pi-hole and possibly logging your DNS requests, so you won't be able to provide the token, in which case you may disregard my request.

I'm going to presume you didn't come here to actually seek help with Pi-hole's configuration.
It sounds a bit like you are frustrated with Pi-hole, which seems understandable, given that it wasn't your choice to make use of it.

But you should probably vent that frustration on your roommate, not on us.

You may want to consider my previous advice from your other post:

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The ad links are posted from the same domains as the content, so you can't prevent the links from appearing with a domain based blocker (i.e. Pi-hole).

Use a browser with an adblocker installed (Firefox and uBlock Origin are a popular combination). A browser extension adblocker can remove the links from appearing entirely.

Your devices don't need to use Pi-hole. Manually assign the DNS on your devices to Google, Cloudflare, Quad9, whatever you choose. Then the DNS traffic from your devices will have no involvement with Pi-hole. This requires no involvement from your roommate - you do this on your own.

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