Using Cloudflare on your website could be blocking RSS users

I maintain an RSS reader for work and Cloudflare is the bane of my existence. Tons of feeds will stop working at random and there’s nothing we can do about it except for individually contacting website owners and asking them to add an exception for their feed URL.

Unfortunately its not really Cloudflare but webadmins who have configured it to block everything thats not a browser, whether unknowingly or not

I was recently contacted by one of my website users as their RSS reader was blocked by Cloudflare.

If Cloudflare offer a product, for a particular purpose, that breaks existing conventions of that purpose, then it’s Cloudflare.

Not really. You wouldn’t complain to a fence company for blocking a path if there were hired to do exactly that

They are enablers. They get part of the blame.

Well it doesn’t break the conventions of the purpose they offer it for. Cloudflare attempts to block non-human users, and this is supposed to be used for human-readable websites. If someone puts cloudflare in front of a RSS feed, that’s user error. It’s like someone putting a captcha in front of an API and then complaining that the Captcha provider is breaking conventions.

Yes, I would. Experts are expected to relay back to their client with their thoughts on a matter, not just blindly do as they're told. Your builder is meant to do their due diligence, which includes making recommendations.

Ah yes, just wrap every protocol in HTTP to get through middle boxes. Just use chrome for all requests becaus fuck having a standard with different implementations. Next you're going to recommend to just automate a Windows PC through simulated mouse and keyboard input to deal with hardware attestation that these fuckers want to bring to the web.

Not my fault if the whole world bought the "openness" bullshit and then built cable-TV-with-mouse.

If that guy makes money with that and has an issue with the Great Firewall Of America, there's a (bad) solution.

I contend this wasn’t an issue prior to Cloudflare making that an option. Sure, some IDS would block some users and geo blocks have been around forever. But, Cloudflare is so prolific and makes it so easy to block things inadvertently, that I don’t think they get a pass and blame the downstream user.

It’s particularly frustrating that they give their own WARP service a pass. I’ve run into many sites that will block VPN traffic, including iCloud Privacy Relay, but WARP traffic goes through just fine.