Energized is nearly dead and it's going on only with automatisms

[e075e]

Hi,
I thank dev(s) for their time and the project, but I am afraid to state that Energized is nearly dead and it's going on only with automatisms.

Main developer @AdroitAdorKhan does not reply to emails or fix issues. If you search for the closed issues, they have been closed by the same author who posted them and the last involvement by dev is 29 October 2021 (#821)

List issues (whitelist or blacklist) had been fixed only by the owner of the original list, for instance I contacted 1hosts to solve this #914.
However, due to how Energized list have been built, searching for the origin of a list issue by an average user is really time consuming since you have to go to https://github.com/EnergizedProtection/block#sources and manually check every source (and they are a lot if you are not lucky)

As far as I learnt:
Energized had huge problems with unresponsive admin(s) ever since 2020, as well as voluntary project team members not being given sufficient GitHub rights to handle all those issues.
Energized have been removed from Blokada (the most prominent adblocker it was included in) for these reasons.

If devs are really reading this, please take actions solving opened issues. Using Energized as it is now, it's deleterious since many sites are just broken and end-users are left at their own.

For users that have no idea where to go now, please have a look at GoodbyeAds, OISD (basic or full) or just find what you like

Best regards
Luca

[StrangePeanut]

Unfortunately, GoodbyeAds and OISD Full are both too large causing high CPU usage with Unbound. OISD Basic is great but doesn’t include any malicious domains…

[badmojr]

Unfortunately, GoodbyeAds and OISD Full are both too large causing high CPU usage with Unbound. OISD Basic is great but doesn’t include any malicious domains…

Try:
https://o0.pages.dev/Pro/unbound.conf
https://o0.pages.dev/Pro/rpz.txt

[e075e]

Unfortunately, GoodbyeAds and OISD Full are both too large causing high CPU usage with Unbound. OISD Basic is great but doesn’t include any malicious domains…

lists

you could try The BlockList Project since it is modular

programs

data based on today:

Energized Basic | 360,119
OISD full | 339,980

Energized Blu | 228,291
GoodbyeAds | 213,266

as you can see in terms of entries number, there are not many differences

on OISD they states

list might be too big for your adblocker and could cause problems. Use at your own risk! That said: It's known to work flawlessly in Pi-hole

Pi-hole is meant to run in a Raspberry system, which has not a lot of resources. I advise you to

• try Pi-hole
• open a bug with unbound since it is made to be "fast and lean". But check you had chosen the right OISD format list for your program

[StrangePeanut]

@badmojr thanks, I’ll have a look at your project and these lists.

[2brownc]

Unfortunately, GoodbyeAds and OISD Full are both too large causing high CPU usage with Unbound. OISD Basic is great but doesn’t include any malicious domains…

If you are not stuck with Unbound and can use another DNS resolver consider using Knot Resolver with RPZ blocklists. OISD Full list takes 0ms to resolve. It's very fast.

Check this blog post for more info.

[StrangePeanut]

@lucamp thanks for your suggestions. Energized Pro Spark should come to about 70k entries total and covers quite a bit. Rarely breaks something genuine despite the project status. As for the Unbound issue, it seems to be a common complaint with reports across different Unbound-based projects going years back. Interestingly, Unbound works with absolutely no issues as long as you don't go 'overboard' with DNSBLs. Pi-hole being a common suggestion, I suppose it either uses a different Unbound (Python-based?) or uses something else altogether? Will look into switching off of Unbound at some point either way.

@2brownc very interesting info, thanks!