I am trying to get iodé browser to refuse acess to a simple website, say https://news.ycombinator.com. I am on the premium plan, and no matter whether I set the blocker with wildcards or regexes, I continue to be able to visit the site. I tried both app-specific block rules and system-wide ones.
Following suggestions for Chrome-based browsers in other threads, I have changed DNS settings from ‘Automatic’ to ‘Off’ in the Android settings. This also did not work. I’ve perused all the Blocker topics and don’t know what else to try.
How do you block a simple website from opening on the default browser?
I have several global rules (globally blacklisted) e.g. *.ycombinator.com and news.ycombinator.com (as wildcard rules), news.ycombinator (wildcard, following your suggestion) and *\.ycombinator\.com (regex).
I also added those three four same rules as iodé browser-specific ones (blacklisted by 1 app).
In Customized blockings I see the 4 global ones in the first panel (under a blue disc). The app-specific ones appear in the second panel (4+836, under a black disc).
If I add a filter by app, it’s very weird - I only now see just two blockings in the blue disc list, both are news.ycombinator.com, one appears as globally blacklisted, the other as blacklisted by 1 app (iodé browser).
This is a painstaking attempt to document my perplexity. No matter how many of these filters I add, global or local, I don’t manage to get iodé browser to block the site. Reloading the page, opening in a new tab or even restarting Android, none of these work.
For the record: this was probably me being confused by the UI of the Iodé blocker. I almost gave up on my premium subscription – the interface is very confusing. Adding and removing rules directly from the “Customized blockings” UI (as described above) had never the sought effect.
What finally worked for me on Iodé OS 5.4 was to start from Per-app blockings, concretely:
open the Iodé app, tap on “Per-app blockings”,
select the relevant app, long press “Customized blockings”
find (just one?) item already there, for me out of all the variants listed above, all of them both globally blacklisted and specifically blacklisted just for the Iodé browser, the only one listed happened to be news.ycombinator.com, tap on it
and then, despite the global blacklisting, insist on blacklisting it for the specific app. Note for this you will have to have created the customized blocking already somewhere else and have made it specific to the app, otherwise you won’t see it in the listing
EDIT: specific grievances with the UI.
The long-press “Customized blockings” from within a specific app’s blockings config loads the general configuration, i.e. you still have to customize the blocking to the app that is provided as context. This is confusing, one would expect that anything customized is customized to the app we’re dealing with.
The use of colors cyan, black and white is also confusing, textual labels (colored if you insist) would be less prone to confusion. In particular cyan seems to mean active customized blocking in the Customized blockings screen, whereas in the app-specific blockings config screen it rather means reinforced blocking. But it is possible to have a customized blocking at the standard level (which is orange). If you don’t believe after this wall of text that this is confusing, just give an Iodé phone to a random (technical if you will) person, together with access to this forum and the iodé web, and look at the process of trial and error to get to blocking a simple website from browser access.
Overall, this was a far too lengthy and frustrating process right at the center of the value proposition of the premium subscription; it took me several hours, and the kind assistance of @sts61 (which made me believe that it was ultimately possible, thank you!) to get things working.
This should be easier. Id like to kindly ask @vince31fr if you Iodé folks could you quickly put together a short blog post or FAQ entry with the specific, official steps for the simple and useful goal of blocking browser access to a specific URL.