Occasionally it’s caused some problems with the tracking crapware that the spouse’s company uses in their web platform. Since they work from home and it breaks the main site they use for work, I’ve had to add some exceptions.

I’ve also seen it occasionally cause problems on websites that rely on tracking garbage and outright fail when they’re blocked. Usually I just never go there again but in a few cases it’s been something I was forced to use so I just disable the pihole for five minutes, do what I need, and hope to never visit that site again.

I think there have been maybe eight of these occurrences in the past five years so it’s not a continual annoyance. No big deal and definitely worth it.

My gf likes to click on ad entries of Google searches - that doesn’t work

There might be a chance for false-positives. Or to just clog your dns responses with repetitive queries.

Then again, you don’t need more than a HaGeZi blocklist anyway.

The only one I ever found in 2 years of pihole use was cdn.cookielaw.org… a good percentage of sites won’t display with it blocked. Most other stuff is fine.

When I first installed pihole I went overboard with blocklists and broke nearly everything… don’t do that :p

Only if you like watching commercials on paramount +

Depending on how you configure it you can run into issues with sites and apps that use trackers.

I can’t think of any problems I’ve faced in over 3 years. I have an app on my phone that I can use to temporarily disable my Pi-hole if I need to do some testing, but I don’t know if I’ve ever had a situation where the Pi-hole was the source of a problem. Definitely not a maintenance headache. I run an update on it every now and then, but only because I see a notification that there is one, not because there’s something going wrong.

I have a pihole, I love it. My wife hates it so much I made her her own Wi-Fi network on her own vlan that’s isolated from the rest of the network and uses Google dns. My wife likes to click ads and watch TikTok and all that shit is blocked on my network

Nope, no issues.

I have like 4 million domains in my blocklist and I have yet to encounter any issues or hear any complaints from my roommate.

I’m using a bunch of blocklists, and the only downside I’ve experienced is Teams being blocked.

Kind of problematic when you look for a job ><

But once you whitelist it, no problem

You have full control over what you block and whitelist. So if anything goes wrong, you can just troubleshoot it and whitelist if needed. If all fails, you can always (temporarily) turn off all blocking in pihole.

DNS blocking is heavily dependent on the blocklist(s) you use. It’s entirely possible to block >95% of crapware, and break companies’ ability to track you without compromising usability.

Having used both for a lot of years, I’d say look instead at AdGuard Home. It is also FOSS but supports more out of the box; including certificate management, the ability to use encrypted DNS both upstream and downstream without need for third party software (cloudflared), the ability to use adblock filter syntax (lists are 200k lines instead of 2 million lines, but actually block more), and so on. PiHole has some improvements pending in the next version, but it’s not there yet in comparison, imho.

I’d also strongly suggest you check out Hagezi’s DNS blocklists, as they’re pretty much set and forget. They’re intended to be used as your only block list, and do an excellent job (see testing in the Discussions on their GitHub). Use the Normal list if you don’t want to deal with false positives occasionally, and the Pro++ list if you don’t mind getting your hands dirty (whitelisting occasionally) and want to block every last scrap of annoyance and anti-privacy crapware on the web. Both will significantly improve your online experience.

I use default block list and had 0 issues so far