Frequently asked questions
The eight questions we are actually asked, answered without hedging.
Can this be bypassed?
Yes, in four ways, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. Somebody with administrator rights can change the DNS setting back in under a minute. A VPN carries its own DNS. Mobile data is a different network entirely. A browser configured to use its own encrypted resolver never asks us.
DNS filtering removes the accidental and the impulsive, not the determined. The limitations page goes through each case and says what, if anything, can be done about it.
Do you log what sites I visit?
Not by default. The resolver keeps answers in memory to serve them faster, and writes no record of who asked for what. You can turn logging on for your own instance if you need it for troubleshooting, and the setting explains what it means before you do.
This is not free for us: it means we cannot show you a weekly summary, and cannot prove our own effectiveness with data. We wrote about the trade-off.
Why is your blocklist so much smaller than everyone else’s?
We publish 69 suffix rules. Products advertising millions of entries are counting subdomain
permutations, country variants and domains that stopped resolving years ago. A suffix rule for
bet365.com already covers every subdomain, so counting them separately inflates the
number without changing what is blocked.
The honest cost of a short, hand-checked list is that it misses the offshore long tail. The argument in full.
Will this break anything else on my network?
Occasionally. A suffix rule can catch a service that shares a parent domain with a listed site; that happened to our own television's update endpoint. When it does, the coverage checker tells you which rule matched, and you can report it or add an allowlist entry. Corrections are published in the changelog.
What happens if your resolver goes down?
Your devices fall back to whatever secondary resolver they were given. If that is a public resolver, you get unfiltered internet rather than no internet. This is a genuine trade-off and you should choose it deliberately: troubleshooting explains both configurations and why we do not decide for you.
Is the hosted plan required?
No. The self-hosted version is free, complete, and is the same software. The hosted plan exists for people who would rather not run a server. Nothing is held back from the free version to make the paid one look better.
Do you work with GAMSTOP?
No, and we are not a substitute for it. GAMSTOP is the national self-exclusion scheme; it stops licensed British operators from accepting you as a customer, which is a stronger and more durable measure than filtering DNS. If you have not registered with it, do that first. Support routes, including GAMSTOP.
Can I use this for something other than gambling?
Technically yes, the resolver does not care what is on a list. We publish gambling, affiliate, lottery and crypto-gambling lists and maintain only those, because a list nobody is reviewing is worse than no list.
Not answered here
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