This might be a good place to ask this. I was messing around with my Asus router setting last night and noticed that it had Ad Guard, which works similarly to PiHole with DNS. To test it I went to Reddit and saw ads still. Is Ad Guard not as effective as PiHole or Reddit ads are DOM based?
As a rule of thumb, I expect that Asus as a business only cares about adbock from two angles:
A feature to slap on the box for advertising.
A B2B feature for helping business management make workers more productive.
To the first, there’s little incentive to ever update the lists after you’ve bought the device, so it’s quickly outdated. To the second, it’s like to be far more optimized for Amazon or Newegg, then for Reddit. Between the two, I don’t generally expect them to hold a candle to pi-hole and similar software.
pihole uses the same method of blocking as adguard dns but is more configurable, and since it’s usually self-hosted you have full control over it.
btw, nextdns is pretty good too (think of it as a managed configurable, slightly more private alternative to adguard dns, great if you’re not into self hosting).
it lacks custom domain blocklists tho. you can add your own white/blacklisted domains but not whole lists, except ones provided by nextdns.
also, it’s a paid service. free tier includes 300k requests per month, which is enough for ~1.5 devices from my experience.
Follow-up question: what open source software projects do you contribute to? I like using Liberapay or Open Collective, with Patreon as a third choice.
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