Hi there,
I have been using piHole for over one year now. Then, the piHole blocked about 45% of ads. Today, October 9th, 2019, it blocks just over 5%. Is there something that has changed in the industry's cat and mouse game?
That's quite a substantial decrease.
There might be several reasons for that:
- the blocklists you are using contain less relevant domains
- you have allowed your browsers to use alternative DNS servers to 'help resolve navigation errors'
- IPv6 has become more prevalent (i.e. you upgrading to Win10 and using more smartphones, tablets, etc.), but your IPv6 configuration does not comprise (or even allow comprising) Pi-hole
- you have opted in to use a DoH (DNS over HTTPS) experimental feature in your browser (once this moves from experimental to mainstream, it has the potential to affect all DNS-based filtering )
- your surfing behaviour changed to visiting sites less susceptible to blocking
l've listed them in no particular order, and the list is probably far from being sufficiently comprehensive.
You forgot the biggest thing!
Adblock style list have been discontinued with the latest Pi-hole release. As a result your domains on blocklist and blocked domains may have decreased. This largely depends on what you have added to your blocklists.
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Any extension in your browser that blocks requests?
For example, I have observed that adding PrivacyBadger to FireFox decreased the blocked domains after the initial "training period" by a significant amount..
I think with the addition of the above post all bases are covered. The answer lies within this thread.
This is not the biggest thing.
That's fair.
Your post title states "less than 5% of ads blocked now." In actuality, what you are seeing is that of all domain requests made to Pi-Hole, 5% of those domain requests were blocked by Pi-Hole. This does not infer that 95% of ads are getting through.
As noted in previous replies, there are a number of potential reasons why the block percentage has gone down. Just one particularly chatty client to an unblocked domain can easily drive the block rate down, as one example.
Since Pi-Hole is intended to block ads, the real measure of success is whether you are suddenly seeing ads where there were previously no ads. Visit a site known to be laden with ads (i.e. cnn.com) and if you don't see ads, then Pi-Hole is working. If you do see ads there, then something is wrong in your Pi-Hole implementation on your network.
If your long term database has the default max number of days of 365, you have a year's worth of long term data to peruse and see if domains that were previously blocked are still blocked.
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Indeed, As per your suggestion, CNN.com and Marketwatch.com's ads are completely blocked.
My piHole is new (reinstalled) but been using piHole during the last 12 months. It's been very good but lately, I have been seeing ads show up in my iPhone apps like CNBC whereas there were none before though. Is it because if ads run inside an App, PiHole isn't able to discern them?
You would need to check your query log and the pihole log at /var/log/pihole.log to determine if there are domains that are not being blocked when you run the IOS app. More importantly, ensure all the DNS traffic from the IOS device is going to Pi-Hole. If you tail the pihole log, you should see a string of traffic from the iPhone. Also, check the DNS settings on the iPhone to ensure that there is no other DNS server set up in addition to Pi-Hole (IPv6 bypasses are frequent).
Well you also have to remember that with apps they can tunnel the DNS. There isn't a single thing that will stop the ads in that scenario.
My network doesn't IPv6 enabled. I assume that it's impossible for IPv6 bypass then, right?
That is correct
Unless you are leaking over CDMA/GSM/LTE
Easy to test - disable the cellular service.
According to this screenshot from the dashboard , most of my queries are IPv6. How is that possible? and most of the queries are being answered by 1.1.1.1 rather than the piHole.
Have you done this yet?
Also can u please take a screenshot of the clients section if they show as ips or tell me if any of your clients ip's start with fe80:
have a look here for an example
here's a screenshot to the top blocked clients.
How do I disable cellular service? Why disable cellular service because I don't even have that.