We are using tool for our company. Its great, but occasionally we need to white or blacklist certain domains. Example:
if you try to stream foxnews video, it blocks a few domains used with part of the streaming (I assume ad-related requirements). We had to put a few white domains in there to permit that to work.
We got a phish email today to most users in our company, so in hopes to prevent users from doing anything with it, we pi-holed the domain as a precaution.
Putting the reason in might be nice for audit purposes. A year later, we may have no idea why its in there or not.
This might be out of scope, but I think it would be useful to have a notes text field that could be entered next to each domain in the whitelist & blacklist.
You could enter any information that proves useful to you to remember when or why a domain was added. For example, you could add the date it was added, a url or service it's intended to fix or block, or the user or device that it was added for.
Just to give a little follow up since my post, for the time being I decided to keep a custom blacklist on github that my pihole subscribes to. That way when I add a new blocked domain, I can add notes to the entries.
For example...
baddomain.com # 06/27/2017 - malware
Of course this doesn't fix the issue of whitelist & wildcard blacklist entries since there isn't the ability to subscribe to those as lists, but it's better than nothing.
Being able to have categories of white/black listed items would be nice, especially if you toggle each category on/off easily. I'm currently looking into splitting my lists into a series of text files that periodically get fed to pihole by a script, e.g.:
The blacklists I can do by just putting them on GitHub, but AFAIK there's no way to subscribe to a whitelist, and able to do it in the UI anyway would be a definite plus.
Just a quick heads up for you guys: We're still aware of this feature request and currently implementing a version of Pi-hole that uses an SQLite3 database for the blocking domains. It will support comments for entries as well as some other features like being able to temporarily disable entries without having to delete them. As this is very fundamental redesign, it will not come overnight, but you are invited to have a look at our idea if you like. It is still in a fairly basic state but already works while some things need to be improved.
"Reason" is called "Comment" now, but else than that it's fully integrated in the upcoming Pi-hole v5.0 release. Furthermore, you can even group domains and adlists together in groups and name them "Ads", "Games", "Porn", etc. and even disable/enable them in one go. A comment can go on top of this categorization. Furthermore, all list entries store their creation and last modification date/time so you can check this as well when you want to see when you have added something (hover mouse over the domain/URL).