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.

  • Snot Flickerman
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    6 months ago

    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.

    • Regalia
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      6 months ago

      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.