Comment by therealmarv
7 years ago
This is so annoying. E.g. it's not unusual to surf the web with Laptop on mobile connection in Philippines but then you get all this CAPTCHAs on all Cloudflare sites with the standard configuration.
Actually this is the biggest reason I don't like Cloudflare. They are discriminating some second/third world countries and if you don't travel much and check websites you will never know.
Many websites owners are also not aware of this issue with Cloudflare. Discriminating traffic like this should at least be an optional opt-in in Cloudflare and not standard.
I think the discrimination against third-world countries are justified as that's the main source of clickspamming and like factories.
Cloudflare is for me the no. 1 company by far which is clustering up the web with their little border controls. No other company made surfing the web so complicated and annoying from distant regions of the world for me.
And because many website owners are just install and use Cloudflare with standard settings they don't care.
It's good that Cloudflare addresses this problem with their extension now but I had a little too much bad taste... this extension is long overdue and I still think it's not the best solution to the main problem (standard DNS settings too restricted).
>I think that discrimination is ok as long as it is not me, or my group being discriminated. FTFY
Did you just assume my nationality?
Do you have a source for that claim? How does sharing IP's with 'like factories' and thousands of other legitimate users justifies getting captcha-blocked by Cloudflare without explicit instructions from the website owners?
Note that you're asking the question as if the statement is true and you just inviting an opinionated justification. The answer to "how does sharing IPs with like factories justify blocking others" is easy to give an opinion on. Proving this is the real cause, that the local ISPs are not doing anything against it, etc. is what I think we should be asking.
2 replies →
Are people actually downvoting this comment just because it's not politically correct?
I mean, you could argue that it's not fair to discriminate entire countries because of the lax abuse policy of their ISPs, but the comment is correct: that's the reason those countries are discriminated against in this context.
I didn't downvote but I don't believe the claim was 100% factual. Cloudflare has always been horrible with dealing with shared IP's even if the users are all legitmate non-malicious. I once worked in an office with a single shared IP for ~200 people and we got constantly captcha-blocked by Cloudflared websites. It was also a problem with google but it was less prevalent and their captcha system was less annoying than Cloudlfare's.
When I was a sysadmin for a few admittedly-not-highly-popular websites, there were definitely more unwelcome bot traffic from US and EU IP's than there were from any 3rd world countries.
I also don't agree that social media "like-factories" should be a concern for Cloudflare at all. Even if they are truly a concern; social media "like-factories" are probably human-operated on third-world countries or bots that are likely running from developed world servers with access to cheaper bandwidth and IP's.
1 reply →
Maybe people are downvoting because GP says it's justified in their opinion? It might be the truth, not most of us can't tell either way, but saying it's justified is a judgemental statement that I find 'justified' to downvote.
2 replies →
I have downvoted because despite having 1st World passport I had experienced traveling a lot in SE Asia how Cloudflare blocks (sorry protects) 1/3 of websites.
Browsing from a cafe, using VPN results in almost every attempt of following link from HackerNews in solving endless captchas. It is like being harrassed on the border control just because you have the wrong passport.
Saddly many of the sites "protected" by Cloudflare are interesting personal sites owned by honest people who had been scared about dangers of traffic from bad places.
Cloudflare is running internet protection racket Al Capone style.
Some cloudflare-based sites show a captcha when visiting from Russia, but it is relatively rare.