Vienam Bans Unskippable Ads, Requires Skip Button to Appear After 5 Seconds

Re:Vienam Bans Unskippable Ads, Requires Skip Button to Appe... by mmh0000 on Tuesday January 06, 2026 @06:33PM (#46520429)

PiHole is fine, I guess. I'm not a huge fan of it personally because:

  - It's local network only, and while I can VPN home, I don't always want to
  - It has a high maintenance overhead, at least for me. It would block too much, then my wife would complain, and I'd have to spend time figuring out the magic rule that was breaking.
  - It's DNS-level blocking only, which is helpful but doesn't cover nearly as much ground as just uBlock can. 
  - The DNS server has annoying preconfigured caching rules, that, while I can work around, it was just more effort for something I don't want to put more effort into.

It's far easier to just install uBlock and tell my wife, if something breaks, just click the red shield icon, then click the giant power button.

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Re:Vienam Bans Unskippable Ads, Requires Skip Button to Appe... by BeetleB on Tuesday January 06, 2026 @06:43PM (#46520539)

But doesn't uBlock only block stuff via the browser?

I want to block ads from most apps.

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Re:Vienam Bans Unskippable Ads, Requires Skip Button to Appe... by mmh0000 on Tuesday January 06, 2026 @06:57PM (#46520670)

A hosts file will do the same as pihole, but locally.

Buttttt, this goes back to my original post. DO NOT INSTALL MALWARE.

Because that's my first rule, I don't use apps with ads.

Generally, if I can't do a thing from a standard website, I probably don't need to be doing it. Otherwise, I have nothing against paying for a good app. For example, I LOVE AutoSleep.

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Re:Vienam Bans Unskippable Ads, Requires Skip Button to Appe... by BeetleB on Tuesday January 06, 2026 @07:12PM (#46520808)

On Android, it sometimes is hard to find a paying app to replace an ads app. The ads model is much more lucrative, so developers go that route.

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