Right now I use AdBlock plus. Occasionally, to get a webpage to work, I have to disable it.
How does Pi-hole mitigate this issue for non-expert users? My main concern is that if I set this up at home, my wife will get annoyed when her web pages don't work and won't have the patience to learn how to add to the whitelist.
Not directly related, but uBlock Origin is a better ad blocker than AdBlock Plus. From what I understand the uBlock Origin uses fewer resources; but more importantly, doesn't take money from advertisers to allow certain ads: https://adblockplus.org/en/about#monetization
It's more trusted nowadays and very easy to switch to.
There’s a simple pause button on the web interface. I bookmarked it on my wife's phone and showed her how to disable and she's had no trouble since. At first she was skeptical about the pi-hole but after seeing the difference it made, she's totally on board. We don't need to disable it often though, maybe once every month or two.
Ha! At least once a week I tell the family "the wifi/internet will be wonky for a bit". Luckily we have unlimited LTE so my wife just switches to that until I'm done.
As a year+ long user, I attest to its greatness. Set it up on the cloud, set your router to distribute the dns and presto-blamo ad-free apps, internet and streaming.
Very occasionaly I might come across something not working. I could go to the pi-hole interface and whitelist, but I find it easier and so infrequent that I usually just turn off WiFi for a minute to load the page over cellular.
I am using pfsense with pfblockerng for ad/tracking protection. My wife spents a good amount of time on a mobile fashion game. In addition to the forced in app purchases once a month, it makes her watch plenty of video ads every day. She has to watch those ads to get virtual currency that can be used to purchase things that is a must for playing the game. With the protection enabled, the ads won't show and she can't play. So I had to whiteliste her mobile in pfblockerng. She still complains that it doesn't work. So she uses mobile data to play the game. I am not sure what else in pfsense is breaking it for her, I haven't looked further into it. One good thing is it helps me save bandwidth. My home internet has 500gb limit after which it drops to 1/10th of the speed. She seems to be using up close to her 1.5gb daily limit almost always, just from this game and facebook. So I get more bandwidth to download stuff!
If she has Android she can download DNSfilter or similar and disable it for her game. It's a local DNS / VPN to block ads with it's own local white / blacklist. I rarely see ads on my phone, except from some game apps that I guess use networks not yet on the blacklist, but I'm not bothered by those, I usually play games I can fully own / pay to remove ads.
It is. I have been trying to get her to stop playing it by introducing to other games. But no. She spents a good chunk of her free time on this. Since she is a teacher, she gets a lot of free time at work too. It hasn't affected either of us negatively that I know off, so I sometimes think let her do what she enjoys. I hope it is not indicative of her being unsatisfied with something in our life.
The game's name is Covet Fashion. They have a huge following in Facebook. The main theme of the game is to dress up models and others vote on it. Whoever gets the "top look" wins (winner gets virtual currency to buy more dress I think). I think they even form teams through Facebook. Sometimes people get kicked out for not helping the team and so on, so I guess there is some drama like reality TV.
So I did experience this. I eventually just moved my wife's phone over to a static IP/external dns so she didn't have to deal with it. But at least the rest of the network (IoT in particular) had less tracking.
I've unexpectedly nice thing was the Roku screensaver went back to a simple bouncing logo instead of the ad-filled scrolling billboard thing.
On a mac, you can set up Network Locations. I have one set up with the pihole dns server, and have the Automatic one set to normal defaults. There's a simple script[0] that will change your Network Location based on the wifi network you connect to, so I don't have to worry about switching it manually when I leave home and I don't have access to the pi as a DNS server.
Granted, none of this answers your question directly, but a manual Network Location switch from System Preferences is a somewhat simple change that's a little less friction than a whitelist. The auto changer should switch it back next time your wife's computer reconnects to the network in case she forgets.
You'd have to show her how to login to the web GUI and temporarily disable it I think, but I wonder if it's the use case.
If you're enabling ad filtering on the DNS level on your router, its more along the lines of forced ad filtering on your entire network, so you're kind of sacrificing user configurability for global ad filtering on your network.
Personally, I've only had the experience of a broken webpage once in two and a half years of using it.
I think it is basically that a website would want to work if an external service failed. DNS blocking looks like that, whereas editing the page content is obviously detectable.
I had to divert a bunch of devices (Samsung TV, Switch, etc.) around the pi-hole because it was easier than trying to figure out what they needed whitelisting.
It doesn't. I stopped using it when one of their default lists started blocking Microsoft.com. I get some people don't like Ms, but that kind of default is just plain negligent. Blocking updates silently is never ok in my book.
How does Pi-hole mitigate this issue for non-expert users? My main concern is that if I set this up at home, my wife will get annoyed when her web pages don't work and won't have the patience to learn how to add to the whitelist.