Comment by esperent
4 hours ago
This article is from 2016, and it should be noted that things have significantly increased since then. I no longer have to click traffic lights and motorcycles, I just have to wait a few seconds. I'm in Vietnam so my IP gets flagged for checks a lot, but they all pass automatically in a few seconds.
The only time I still get asked to click motorcycles is not Cloudflare, it's Google. They absolutely hate when you try to do a search in an incognito window and will give you an unpassable captcha until you give up and use DDG instead.
Yup, the CloudFlare CAPTCHAs are a nuisance, but they're so much better than the Google reCAPTCHAs they replaced. Those things must be designed to make you give up.
Today I looked up a word definition on tfd.com (usually a lightning-fast website), it took 3 cloudflare screens each 10 seconds to load. Why?. Because I'm in South East Asia? I aborted mission and pasted the word in a search engine and had a definition in <5 seconds. Sad to see some of my favourite sites becoming unusable.
The shorter the average interaction with the site, the worse the burden cloudflare becomes. E.g. looking up a definition is usually a 5-10 second job, Cloudflare can make it take almost an order of magnitude longer.
In defence of motorcylces and traffic lights, those captchas are annoying too, but they do help humanity in a tiny, tiny way. By contrast, watching a cloudflare loading spinner is stupefyingly useless.
(apologies for ranting. I find it disproportionately irritating even though it's only a few minutes per day, possibly due to the sheer repetition involved).
Archive.org seems to work well as proxy for tfd.
add tfd = http://web.archive.org/web/2026if_/https://www.thefreedictio... as a search engine. (This is our internet now.)
Woah, yeah just tried tfd.com and got 10 CF redirects, still not loading.
From Germany: Two redirects, one for tfd.com, one for the redirected www.thefreedictionary.com. That's the choice -- and fault -- of the domain and webserver owners to have this full redirect instead of serving from the short domain directly.
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I didn't realize the article was from 2016. I still have to click motorcycles and traffic lights sometimes. So nothing has changed at all! I didn't know they were using those motorcycles and traffic lights for almost 10 years already