Using Cloudflare on your website could be blocking RSS users

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.

I randomize my User-Agent header and many websites outright block me, most often with no captcha and no useless error message.

The most egregious is Microsoft (just about every Microsoft service/page, really), where all you get is a "The request is blocked." and a few pointless identifiers listed at the bottom, purely because it thinks your browser is too old.

CF's captcha page isn't any better either, usually putting me in an endless loop if it doesn't like my User-Agent.

Rails is going to make this much worse for you. All new apps include naive agent sniffing and block anything “old” https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/50505

This is horrifying. What happened to simply displaying a "Your browser is outdated, consider upgrading" banner on the website?

idk, even that seems too much to me, but maybe I'm just being too senstive.

but like, why is it a website's job to tell me what browser version to use? unless my outdated browser is lacking legitmate functionality which is required by your website, just serve the page and be done with it.