Designing a site to not be affected by bots is fixing the problem. Blocking things that are bot-like, poorly, with no technical understanding, is a kludge, not a fix.
Which is exactly what Cloudflare does, although most people would make a distinction between degrading an experience and outright causing something to not work at all.
Building a WAF that has zero false positives and zero false negatives is impossible. All we can ask is that the companies that build WAFs be responsive, but they also need accurate bug reports with sufficient information to identify the variable.
That's already been established. My point is that there exists a tradeoff. Blocking a small number of legitimate users can be worth the benefits blocking the bots.
Except the Cloudflare firewall is just so goddamn dumb. It considers all of Asia a "bot", anybody who uses Linux or has a tracker blocker. I've had this complaint from several regular people who don't even have an adblocker.
Designing a site to not be affected by bots is fixing the problem. Blocking things that are bot-like, poorly, with no technical understanding, is a kludge, not a fix.
That is not always possible, may not be affordable, or may degrade the overall user experience.
> That is not always possible
It is definitely always possible.
> may not be affordable
You hired the wrong person / people, then.
> may degrade the overall user experience
Which is exactly what Cloudflare does, although most people would make a distinction between degrading an experience and outright causing something to not work at all.
> with no technical understanding
WTF?
Building a WAF that has zero false positives and zero false negatives is impossible. All we can ask is that the companies that build WAFs be responsive, but they also need accurate bug reports with sufficient information to identify the variable.
I would ask that the companies that build WAFs please stop, honestly.
I don't think you understood the parent.
> Designing a site to not be affected by bots is fixing the problem.
Bots footprint is minimal and shouldn't affect your site performance.
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> Blocking things that are bot-like, poorly, with no technical understanding, is a kludge, not a fix.
a kludge might be better than none. And it's an easy kludge (for the site owner - a checkbox in cloudflare).
The fault lies with cloudflare implementing a lazy bot detector.
And blocking users can make the user experience worse.
That's already been established. My point is that there exists a tradeoff. Blocking a small number of legitimate users can be worth the benefits blocking the bots.
Maybe, but it has to be a really sharp ratio.
Except the Cloudflare firewall is just so goddamn dumb. It considers all of Asia a "bot", anybody who uses Linux or has a tracker blocker. I've had this complaint from several regular people who don't even have an adblocker.
I just put my content behind a paywall. If the bots want to pay $50/mo I guess I don't mind. No cloudflare!