It's nice that you can add custom lists with domains to be blocked by Pihole.
An additional feature that I would like to see is the ability to add categories to domains or lists of domains.
Some samples: "ads", "malware", "phishing",...
In the admin console it would be cool to see statistics based on blocked domain categories.
This type of information could even be used to send alerts based on blocked requests from certain categories, such as malware.
This is definitely out of scope for the developers. They don't compile lists of domains, instead they rely on lists that are already out there.
Usually, the list of compiled domains are not categorized. That would take a lot of work to categorize and confirm it.
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As noted by @Excelerate246, we do not curate the lists that make up the blocking aspect of the Pi-hole, but we do provide the addresses from where we pull the lists, and allow full customization of the contents once they have been pulled. We just don't have the time or ability to categorize domains, and there would be constant disputes over which category a domain belongs in.
I know the developers do not manage the lists themselves, so I wouldn't expect them to add and/or manage categories to the lists.
The way I see this is for users to be able to choose custom categories for the lists they add to their Pi-hole and for the default lists.
When a user adds a list, they could mark it with any category they want.
"URL to list of domains to be blocked", "Malware"
This category would then be applied to all the URLs in this list.
For the devs, this would not create any additional work once the feature is there.
There wouldn't be disputes for domain categories either, since users could just choose whatever categories they want. For people not interested in this feature, a default category could be used, or the category information could be left out of the graphs.
Does this make sense or do you have any additional concerns?
I still don't quite understand...are you saying to have a user-filled blank field or tag that could be associated with a certain list? Many lists also contain ad and malware domains or some mix of others...
That's indeed what I'm saying!
You do have a point there about the lists potentially containing multiple categories, but that would be up to the users to decide. They can choose to include lists containing only 1 category or tag a list with a custom category that matches every domain in the list.
OK, we'll look into it. Thanks.
For the Block Lists it would be useful to have a set of Default Groups such as:
Adverts
Gambling
Malware
Phishing
Porn
Ransomware
Trackers
Or at least let us create the categories.
The reason would be if we assigned multiple lists to groups we could turn them on/off all in one go.
In addition if we could set certain block lists by time, so say if you have a business environment and you want to block all social media sites/streaming sites outside of lunch (12.00 - 14.00) then you could, it would allow some environments to auto-turn on block lists during peak work times.
Implemented in v5.0 with Group Management.