Using Cloudflare on your website could be blocking RSS users

I run NewsBlur[0] and I’ve been battling this issue of NewsBlur fetching 403s across the web for months now. My users are revolting and asking for refunds. I’ve tried emailing dozens of site owners and publishers and only two of them have done the work of whitelisting their RSS feed. It’s maddening and is having a real negative effect on NewsBlur.

NewsBlur is an open-source RSS news reader (full source available at [1]), something we should all agree is necessary to support the open web! But Cloudflare blocking all of my feed fetchers is bizarre behavior. And we’re on the verified bots list for years, but it hasn’t made a difference.

Let me know what I can do. NewsBlur publishes a list of IPs that it uses for feed fetching that I've shared with Cloudflare but it hasn't made a difference.

I'm hoping Cloudflare uses the IP address list that I publish and adds them to their allowlist so NewsBlur can keep fetching (and archiving) millions of feeds.

[0]: https://newsblur.com

[1]: https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur

Maybe pay for residential proxy network access?

I used to get my internet from a small local ISP, and ip blacklisting basically means no one in our zipcode could have reliable internet.

These days, the 10-20% of us with an unobstructed sky view switched to starlink and didn’t look back.

The thing is, both ISPs use CGNAT, but there’s no way cloudflare is going to block Musk like they do the mom and pop shop.

Anyway, apparently residential proxy networks work pretty well if you hit a spurious ip block. I’ve had good luck with apple private relay too.

I’m hoping service providers realize how useless and damaging ip blocking is to their reputations, but I’m not holding my breath. Sometimes I think the endgame is just routing 100% of residential traffic through 8.8.8.8.