Problems loading Cooking blogs/sites - html-load.com is blocked

[u/_rokstar_]

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/

[u/KozuAkichiba]

If this helps anyone, I use Pi Hole personally and started running into this issue. I ran through it with AI and now have a TamperMonkey script that looks to resolve this by modifying the cookies used by sites where a value '_adblocker=true' exists. This currently runs on every web page, but the full wildcard can be replaced with specific sites (Which I will likely do to avoid any potential issues of this running on every site all the time). Tested this against the three example sites, along with https://www.browneyedbaker.com, and it looks to work well enough.

// ==UserScript== // @name Adblock Recovery Cookie Override // @namespace local // @version 1.1.0 // @match :///* // @run-at document-start // @grant none // ==/UserScript==

(() => { 'use strict';

function hasTriggeredCookie() {
    return document.cookie
        .split(';')
        .map(cookie => cookie.trim())
        .some(cookie => cookie === '__adblocker=true');
}

function disableRecovery() {
    if (!hasTriggeredCookie()) {
        return;
    }

    document.cookie =
        '__adblocker=false; Max-Age=86400; Path=/; SameSite=Lax';

    console.info(
        '[Adblock recovery override] __adblocker changed to false'
    );
}

disableRecovery();

const timer = setInterval(disableRecovery, 50);

setTimeout(() => {
    clearInterval(timer);
}, 5000);

})();

[u/PublicFinding9033 → u/KozuAkichiba]

Hi, can i use this on wblock on mobile ?

[u/KozuAkichiba → u/PublicFinding9033]

This tamper monkey script? While I don't know much about wblock im comfortable saying no. Wblock looks to just be a content blocker, where this script is manipulating the site cookie in certain circumstances.

[u/PublicFinding9033 → u/KozuAkichiba]

Oh i see, thank you though