Notification for Adlists whose Content has not changed in a long time

Feature Requests
1

This request would be for an alert or notification for adlists whose content has not changed in a long time. Similar to the alert given for when an adlist is not available during a scheduled update.
The reason for this request is adlists stop being maintained every once in a while. This requires looking through the adlist list and clicking each one to verify how long it has been since the content has updated.

2

Yes. I think this is a good feature and we have the necessary data already.

The remaining question is: How long is

?

I would not really want to make this configurable. I can also already hear users complaining that this is bleating about some files they "maintain" themselves with maybe only one or two domains on them which is really not changing in years.

3

Delta t from last time change times two or maybe four?

EDIT: Oh I think it needs some dampening like averaging the delta's.
Some lists might be updated twice over a period of two weeks and then fall silent for a longer period.
Which would mean an extra record to keep track of the average/mean delta t.

4

I would think six months without the content of a list being updated could be a good starting time to send a notification. This could always be updated later or maybe even a custom time setting in the advanced settings.
For users custom lists, maybe a checkbox/toggle in the lists configuration page that tells the content update timer to ignore that list.

1 Like
5

Hate to bump a thread but wanted to see if there was any more thought on this.

6

Have a setting so the user can select the number of days. 0 for no notification.

8

The status information box for each line has the necessary data. I suggest two option setting lines added to the status information box:

  • Notify if list update fails for xxx days
  • Notify if list unchanged for xxx days

Zero days means notification is off for that entry and notifications are added to the Pi-Hole diagnosis log.

Butch

9

I didn't think this was really needed but apparently people have been using a list which was once included as a Pi-hole default but has been unmaintained since 2018, and thought everything was fine.

I don't know how the exact answer the question "how long is a long time"? But clearly somewhere less than 6 years would have helped in this situation.

Edited to add: Maybe a heatmap could be used similarly to the network table. Greenish colours indicating recent updates through to red for clearly stale files at whatever time that was decided to be.

10

I like the heatmap idea similar to the network table showing how long a list hasn’t been updated by the maintainer. I would be happy with just a notification of a stale list just to get the feature rolling though.

11

Very good idea!