I'm using pi-hole and have some suggestions to help it block better.
Get rid of the archaic posix regular expressions (ere) and substitute them with a more powerful and more recent familiy. I've searched a bit yesterday and there are libraries even for C.
Provide the user with some means to temporarily disable (and later re-enable) a regexp in the 'blocklist' tab.
Provide the advanced users the alternative of using a connector to an external matcher, bypassing pi-hole's.
Please consider these. I understand that open source projects are usually undermanned and the requests are coming all the time from everywere in the globe, but I think that upgrading the very heart of the project will benefit all users altogether. I think this is a good software that can easily become a lot better. So I'm posting this. Thank you.
Good thing! And the negation is very necessary, because regexes (by design) suffer in negations. On the other hand, workarounds such as lookaheads are not supported by posix ere which pihole is sadly using. Please seriously consider upgrading the regexes to something more powerful. I've been writing all night trying to block whatever ends with "ad/ads", without blocking whatever ends with "download/s"...… Masochism!
Thanks again for the reply. Yes, I'll try to direct the queries to my own matcher because ere's are not helping in my case (and also, even pcre's are cumbersome some times). Maybe I'll build a real state machine and match against it.
I've looked at v5 code in comparison to v4 and v5 is certainly a lot more capable with the database and the regexes in the white list. So I've switched to 5 and now I'm using complementary regexes in both black and white list which seems to be going as far as I want. With more potent regexes I could reduce my lists a bit more but even now I'm on a good track. Thanks. Keep on the good work.
