Using Cloudflare on your website could be blocking RSS users

My email is jgc@cloudflare.com. I'd like to hear from the owners of RSS readers directly on what they are experiencing. Going to ask team to take a closer look.

It's cool and all that you're making an exception here, but how about including a "no, really, I'm actually a human" link on the block page rather than giving the visitor a puzzle: how to report the issue to the page owner (hard on its own for normies) if you can't even load the page. This is just externalising issues that belong to the Cloudflare service.

I am not trying to "make an exception", I'm asking for information external to Cloudflare so I can look at what people are experiencing and compare with what our systems are doing and figure out what needs to improve.

Some "bots" are legitimate. RSS is intended for machine consumption. You should not be blocking content intended for machine consumption because a machine is attempting to consume it. You should not expect a machine, consuming content intended for a machine, to do some sort of step to show they aren't a machine, because they are in fact a machine. There is a lot of content on the internet that is not used by humans, and so checking that humans are using it is an aggressive anti-pattern that ruins experiences for millions of people.

It's not that hard. If the content being requested is RSS (or Atom, or some other syndication format intended for consumption by software), just don't do bot checks, use other mechanisms like rate limiting if you must stop abuse.

As an example: would you put a captcha on robots.txt as well?

As other stories here can attest to, Cloudflare is slowly killing off independent publishing on the web through poor product management decisions and technology implementations, and the fix seems pretty simple.