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Using Cloudflare on your website could be blocking RSS users

(openrss.org)
556 points campuscodi | 1 comments | 16 Oct 24 22:46 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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amatecha ◴[17 Oct 24 06:43 UTC] No.41867018[source]▶
I get blocked from websites with some regularity, running Firefox with strict privacy settings, "resist fingerprinting" etc. on OpenBSD. They just give a 403 Forbidden with no explanation, but it's only ever on sites fronted by CloudFlare. Good times. Seems legit.
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neilv ◴[17 Oct 24 12:50 UTC] No.41869190[source]▶
Similar here. It's not unusual to be blocked from a site by CloudFlare when I'm running Firefox (either ESR or current release) on Linux.

I suspect that people operating Web sites have no idea how many legitimate users are blocked by CloudFlare.

And. based on the responses I got when I contacted two of the companies whose sites were chronically blocked by CloudFlare for months, it seemed like it wasn't worth any employee's time to try to diagnose.

Also, I'm frequently blocked by CloudFlare when running Tor Browser. Blocking by Tor exit node IP address (if that's what's happening) is much more understandable than blocking Firefox from a residential IP address, but still makes CloudFlare not a friend of people who want or need to use Tor.

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1. amatecha ◴[17 Oct 24 16:00 UTC] No.41870881[source]▶
Yeah, I've contacted numerous owners of personal/small sites and they are usually surprised, and never have any idea why I was blocked (not sure if it's an aspect of CF not revealing the reason, or the owner not knowing how to find that information). One or two allowlisted my IP but that doesn't strike me as a solution.

I've contacted companies about this and they usually just tell me to use a different browser or computer, which is like "duh, really?" , but also doesn't solve the problem for me or anyone else.