<story><title>Cloudflare Is Having Issues</title><url>https://www.cloudflarestatus.com</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tomwheeler</author><text>You left out this one:&lt;p&gt;- They want their vendor to arbitrarily deny access to customers and prospects&lt;p&gt;Maybe they have a 100% success rate at blocking actual threats but they sure do have a lot of false positives. I get blocked or forced into captchas at least three times per week.&lt;p&gt;I used to report it to the site admins, but among the few that responded, almost none knew how to fix it. I no longer bother, so I suspect that the less clueless admins have no idea how many visitors Cloudflare has driven away.</text></item><item><author>judge2020</author><text>Sites don&amp;#x27;t need cloudflare, unless:&lt;p&gt;- They want to save on bandwidth costs&lt;p&gt;- They have to deal with some level of DDOS or site scrapers hitting every page at once&lt;p&gt;- They want to block IPs, geographies, ASNs, etc. without editing a server config&lt;p&gt;- They want speed &amp;amp; server-sided visitor analytics, email routing, security settings, redirect configuration, and DNS all in one dashboard</text></item><item><author>lagniappe</author><text>Off topic: Cloudflare, like Google, is bad for the internet- not just for the way they centralize the internet but for the way they begin to conflate themselves &lt;i&gt;with&lt;/i&gt; The Internet. Very few sites need Cloudflare, and of those with it equipped, an even fewer number configure it or use it correctly for their application.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bamfly</author><text>&amp;gt; I used to report it to the site admins, but among the few that responded, almost none knew how to fix it. I no longer bother, so I suspect that the less clueless admins have no idea how many visitors Cloudflare has driven away.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s an acceptable cost, versus other ways of dealing with abusive traffic.&lt;p&gt;Hell, we (sysadmins, back when that was a term people used) used to just blackhole all the IP blocks associated with certain countries—made the logs &lt;i&gt;so very much&lt;/i&gt; quieter, and this was back when the &lt;i&gt;whole Internet&lt;/i&gt; was a lot quieter to begin with. At least CloudFlare&amp;#x27;s less blunt than that.&lt;p&gt;Failing to block abusive traffic can be really expensive. Detecting it is always going to cause false positives. Admins are OK with those as long as they don&amp;#x27;t cost more than implementing a system with fewer false positives would. A half-percent tax on revenue (to pick a number out of a hat) in the form of lost customers is a reasonable trade-off for a lot of companies. You&amp;#x27;ve got to have pretty serious scale before it&amp;#x27;s worth investing real money to try to shave that down by a couple tenths of a percent (you&amp;#x27;ll never get it to zero, and only places like Amazon have the kind of scale that make it worth attempting to closely approach zero)</text></comment>
<story><title>Cloudflare Is Having Issues</title><url>https://www.cloudflarestatus.com</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tomwheeler</author><text>You left out this one:&lt;p&gt;- They want their vendor to arbitrarily deny access to customers and prospects&lt;p&gt;Maybe they have a 100% success rate at blocking actual threats but they sure do have a lot of false positives. I get blocked or forced into captchas at least three times per week.&lt;p&gt;I used to report it to the site admins, but among the few that responded, almost none knew how to fix it. I no longer bother, so I suspect that the less clueless admins have no idea how many visitors Cloudflare has driven away.</text></item><item><author>judge2020</author><text>Sites don&amp;#x27;t need cloudflare, unless:&lt;p&gt;- They want to save on bandwidth costs&lt;p&gt;- They have to deal with some level of DDOS or site scrapers hitting every page at once&lt;p&gt;- They want to block IPs, geographies, ASNs, etc. without editing a server config&lt;p&gt;- They want speed &amp;amp; server-sided visitor analytics, email routing, security settings, redirect configuration, and DNS all in one dashboard</text></item><item><author>lagniappe</author><text>Off topic: Cloudflare, like Google, is bad for the internet- not just for the way they centralize the internet but for the way they begin to conflate themselves &lt;i&gt;with&lt;/i&gt; The Internet. Very few sites need Cloudflare, and of those with it equipped, an even fewer number configure it or use it correctly for their application.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>RoyGBivCap</author><text>&amp;gt;&lt;i&gt;I get blocked or forced into captchas at least three times per week.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Same.&lt;p&gt;I get blocked on websites I have accounts on if I use a VPN. I&amp;#x27;m not just a visitor, I&amp;#x27;m a member, and still get blocked by cloudflare. Other times it&amp;#x27;s a small or local business and to me the website just looks &lt;i&gt;down&lt;/i&gt;. Then, if I bother to think about &lt;i&gt;and&lt;/i&gt; willing to drop my VPN, suddenly the website works fine.&lt;p&gt;Treating VPN users as hostile is getting really fuckin old.</text></comment>