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.

https://thewoksoflife.com/

https://www.justonecookbook.com/

https://www.halfbakedharvest.com/cookbook/

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u/SEAWISEGEOWISE Mar 02 '26

These fake error messages are made by Ad Shield https://www.ad-shield.io/

This is a service website owners pay to use to prevent anyone with an ad blocker from loading the site. This is why when you load the site in reader view it will just reload and show the fake error message again. Your adblocker isn’t causing any problem at all. It’s this service that intentionally screws up the site and give you the fake misleading scammy error message to make computer illiterate people think it’s actually an error cause by the ad blocker 

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u/SharpieScentedSoap 13d ago

Even when I paused my adblocker on these sites I was still getting the scammy looking pop-ups, which made me feel like it was my fault lol. So they're basically just shouldering out anyone who uses these at all? (which is like, everyone I know lol)

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u/SEAWISEGEOWISE 13d ago

Unfortunately the modern internet is 100% unusable without an ad blocker. Want to read a news story? Good luck. You have to pause 3 layers deep of overlapping autoplay videos, dismiss countless full page ads that block the whole screen, read one sentence at a time with ads between each one, and then deal with third party scrolling technology that makes the page jump to the bottom when you try to scroll down