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Ask HN: Frequent Cloudflare Captcha/Blocking on various websites?

10 points by wasi0013 ↗ HN
Most of the websites that are protected with cloudflare are harder to access these days. Sometime they just put me in an infinite loop of JS challenges, or directly blocks the access and doesn't even show the JS/captcha challenges at all. Cloudflare-wrap also doesn't help.

It's quite annoying. Anyone else having similar issues?

5 comments

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porkbeer
Welcome to the digital ghetto.
solardev
Are you using Firefox or a VPN/TOR, or outside the US?

You can try Cloudflare Privacy Pass and see if it helps you: https://developers.cloudflare.com/waf/tools/privacy-pass/

wasi0013
Yes, Outside of US. No, not using Firefox. VPN has little to no effect, when it happens. I even tried their own product cloudflare-wrap. It makes things worse sometime, which is an irony.

Privacy pass needs to be configured/enabled on the website's end or zone, no? I'm somewhat skeptical on using such extensions, I would rather avoid going to the websites unless it's a necessity.

solardev
Hmm, I didn't realize Privacy Pass was an opt-in. That's too bad. That didn't seem to be the case when it came out, but maybe they changed it or maybe I just misremembered.

In that case, I have some bad news for you (which you already experience every day). Cloudflare lets website owners have different security levels for different countries. I think it's pretty common for some websites (especially smaller ones with a primarily US audience) to lock down other countries tighter. At one job I had to do that, and we altogether banned all Chinese and Russian IPs in Cloudflare -- on purpose. Overnight, bots and scans went from tens of thousands a day to virtually zero. We locked down other countries too, but not quite so tightly. It was selfish of us, but as a small business with mostly American customers, it was a tradeoff we chose. I would imagine other orgs make similar rules under pressure.