I am a plebe who doesn’t understand these things but what exactly does cloudflare do? I see it popping up more and more often redirecting before visiting a site. I assume that this has something to do with bot traffic? It seems like every mention of cloudflare is about how it ruined someone’s day.
Essentially, their entire schtick is being a middleman. By sitting between the server you want to visit, they can do helpful things like DDOS protection, being a CDN (basically store website assets closer to you), managing HTTPS for you and providing access to your website over IPv6 even if your server doesn’t have it.
By nature of that though, their position is quite sensitive since it has become a service that a good chunk of the Internet goes through. That causes concerns about centralization and pisses in a lot of people’s cereals politically.
It can also mean if you’re just an average Joe from some random country that is well-known for being the source of botnets or DDOS attacks, you’re fucked out of luck on accessing half the internet because Cloudflare assumes you’re part of the problem based on your source IP. Denied access because of someone else’s wrongdoing seems like a really bad side-effect.
Yeah, it’s a technically difficult problem to deal with because you’re probably often sharing an IP address or a block of IPs with bad actors. You can’t really share details about it without giving them a hand.
I guess cynically said, you could probably go through their VPN service to fix it, I’ve seen that from time to time.