Not an issue - just food for thought

[pms967]

First of all, thank you for providing this nice piece of software. Keep up the good work!

I'd like to share a few thoughts, which possibly may inspire some new ideas. Take them for what they're worth.

1. DBAB works great... but sometimes even too much so. :) Nowadays there are some sites which goes to a great extent to detect the use of any kind of ad-blocker, and becomes completely unusable if you do. Unfortunately, AFAIK to date there is no way to quickly and easily disable or by-pass dbab if/when one needs to access one such site. One very nice and useful feature would be to somehow add such possibility... though I understand that this is by no means something trivial to do at the DNS level.

The only easy way to do so which comes to my mind would be to simply add a "white-list", but that would open up ads also from unintended sites. A more viable and useful option could be setup some sort of "flag", which may be set e.g. by a dedicated browser extension, to temporarily disable dbab filtering when browsing such sites (to get that to work even for "centralized", LAN-wide installations the "flag" should be issued e.g. via a dedicated net port to with dbab is listening to...).

Another (more complex...) option perhaps could be to create a list of sites which requires disabling ad-blockers to be useful, then monitor the DNS requests and dynamically white-list the required ads based on the previous requests within a certain time-window.

Or... are there any smarter way to accomplish the same goal?

2. Although dbab works great in most cases, it can be easily defeated if the ads are referred to directly by IP, by-passing name resolution (which I noticed is done by some sites). I guess the only way to address such cases would be to block those IPs using firewall rules instead...

That's it for now. Hope it can be useful.

[suntong]

Hi, thanks for the input @pms967.

As for thee ads referred to directly by IP, yeah, that's annoying, and I agree with you that using firewall rules is a more appropriate way.

For those sites that detects ad-blockers, I view it as their lost as I'd just refuse to visit them and find other alternatives instead. However,

If you cannot avoid them but still need a quick and easy to disable or by-pass dbab, make /etc/resolv.conf a symlink that points to either dbab or 1.1.1.1 / 8.8.8.8, if you're using a PC. It works for me as I only need to make such toggling once every one or two years. YMMV.

HTH

[pms967]

If you cannot avoid them but still need a quick and easy to disable or by-pass dbab, make /etc/resolv.conf a symlink that points to either dbab or 1.1.1.1 / 8.8.8.8, if you're using a PC.

Sure, I know that. Unfortunately to me (and I guess to others as well) in some cases (not always, fortunately...) that may happen several time during a single session. In such cases using that method can become quite inconvenient. :-(

That's why I was suggesting to add a "by-pass mode" to dbab itself, with some convenient API (may be a simple socket or web interface) which may be used to easily and quickly switch from normal to by-pass mode and vice-versa using a simple dedicated tool (such as a command line and/or GUI utility, a dedicate browser extension, ecc.) or the browser itself.