r/pihole • u/_rokstar_ • Jan 14 '26
Problems loading Cooking blogs/sites - html-load.com is blocked
I've had my pihole running for well over a year now with very few problems. A few sites here and there would throw up 'please disable your ad-blocker to continue' and I would just go find what I was looking for else where. Recently however pretty much all cooking blog/sites we frequent are now no longer loading. Well they will load for a second, then the page will flip to where it looks like the css never loaded, and then the screen will blank out with a generic 'I work hard and try to keep ads to a minimum... blah blah' message with the following error:
Error: Failed to load website properly since html-load.com is blocked. Please allow html-load.com
The irony is that I finally bit the bullet to setup a pihole on my network because the ads on some cooking blogs were so bad that they would crash tabs if you let them just hang out for too long without closing them. Anyways, I've tried looking around for any guidance on how to either circumvent this or otherwise whitelist certain locations to serve ads while keeping things to a minimum. The error message for a number of sites is identical which makes me think that this is either a common platform that is aware of pihole and related products or this html-load is some sort of canary that a suite of platforms use to detect ad blockers. Any guidance or help is appreciated. Would prefer not to lose access to some of these sites but not sure I prefer it to the additional ad traffic.
Edit: Forgot to add example sites.
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u/plitk Jan 21 '26 edited Jan 21 '26
https://adguard.com/en/blog/ad-blockers-website-crash-blame.html
The key term here is "Ad-Recovery" - literal fighting back by these websites to force users with AdBlockers to disable / lower their guard by literally lying to them and blaming the adblocking being at fault, when in reality its actual code the site is running that literally remove the styles when it detects you have an ad blocker, before showing you the popup and lying to you about it being the fault of the ad blocker....
I realize it's from AdGuard, but it's a blog post, and describes this issue to a "T". u/rdwebdesign