I’ve been running PiHole for at least 5 years and have never seen an ad on sourceforge.
Whilst downloading some software today, the whole page was littered with ads! I thought for a moment PiHole was broken, but on closer inspection the ads are being served via content-loader.com.
I could not find any info on content-loader.com, so assume this is safe to block? I would like to submit the domain to some ad blocking lists if someone can confirm.
Interestingly using Brave, the ads did not appear.
Don’t know a thing about the content-loader site. That said, there is no harm in trying it. If the sourceforge stops working, and you really need the download, temporarily disable blocking when needed.
I don’t see content-loader com but a new domain adtraffic quality . google
Seems to be a recently introduced AI tool
Google uses AI in new ways to fight invalid ad traffic
You’re right, it’s changed and I no longer see any ads.
It’s quite a shock to the system to suddenly see ads when running PiHole for so long. Thanks to the PiHole team!
Don’t forget that Pi-hole relies on ad lists from others. So, there really is no guarantee that a new site would be on an existing list, even if the list is updated. It may take some time. With that in mind, you can always add domains to Pi-hole at any time.
This is an “ad recovery" service by Ad Shield, this seems to be one of their new domains
Note that they (Ad Shield) are extremely aggressive with anti ad blocks, and adding this domain to Pi Hole is likely going to cause the entire website to not work, if you don't have any browser based ad block to defuse their script, as their anti ad block script does a “if ads can't load, you can't have the website”, and straight up deletes all CSS on the website while attempting to redirect you to an “error" page, blaming your ad block for the “error".
Adguard has a write up here
This topic was automatically closed 7 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.