For years this button seems to have caused misunderstanding.
It also took me a long time to understand it to some extent.
Do I understand correctly that this deactivation (query log) has no influence at all on the Admin interface?
This log is only needed for internal processes? But what stops working when it is deactivated?
To make this button more understandable:
Besides the imo desirable and necessary renaming.
Isn't this purely a data protection issue, which is much better dealt with in the “Privacy” settings?
Pi-hole keeps track of client activities in three different storage systems:
a. The most recent 24 hours are held in memory. The dashboard and the Query Log show data from that in-memory data.
b. If query logging is enabled, pihole-FTL will log client activities to /var/log/pi-hole.log. Tools|Tail pihole.log provides a live view of that file.
That file is rotated daily, and older versions are kept for at most 5 days.
c. If the long-term database is enabled, Pi-hole will store a representation of client queries in a database located at /etc/pihole/pihole-FTL.db, where queries older than MAXDBDAYS will be removed.
Upon restart, Pi-hole would populate its in-memory data from the long-term db with the most recent 24 hours.
The Long-term Data section of Pi-hole's UI interacts with the database.
As the name would suggest, the Disable query logging button deals with b.
I can see that the naming isn't as obvious if you aren't aware of above storage procedures, but including all of that in the button would seem a bit unwieldy.
Maybe it could be reworked into a dialog allowing to pick from those options?
Log files may be the most complete as well as most readily accessible information on past activities, so they often are valuable for analysing Pi-hole's behaviour.
Pi-hole would remain fully operational without log files, so it's really up to user requirements, e.g. consuming log files would be quite common for system monitoring tools (in case you'd use those), users fluent with grep may feel more at home when analysing log files than summoning some SQL statement to search the long-term database, etc..
Also, depending on your configuration, the log files may contain information that isn't available in a. nor c., like DHCP messages when Pi-hole acts as your DHCP server.
It is probably also the name of the button “Disable query logging” and the same name “Query Log” in the dashboard and under Long-term Data that is causing these comprehension problems.
Perhaps a simple change of the name to “Disable logging” will cause fewer problems.
Maybe some more information in the Confirmation area, maybe a link to an explanation like the one above.
A selection menu with further options would of course be great.
Can you initiate this? Or should I write something about it? Under Github and Issues?
No. The dashboard is populated on restart from the query database at /etc/pihole/pihole-FTL.db. If this database is disabled, then the dashboard will be empty on restart.