How bad the Bot hits are on the Forum

[wanderer2575]

This morning is a good example of why half the internet being reliant on one company is a bad thing.  "Let's do a quick forum skim... oh deah, Cloudflare is down.  Maybe read some fanfic... oh, AO3 also uses Cloudflare.  But the story I'm reading is also on FFN... which also uses Cloudflare".

One day Cloudflare and CloudStrike will join forces and send humanity back to the 1980s.

Yeah, well, I never had these problems back then with my Commodore 64, so...

[1995hoo]

This morning is a good example of why half the internet being reliant on one company is a bad thing.  "Let's do a quick forum skim... oh deah, Cloudflare is down.  Maybe read some fanfic... oh, AO3 also uses Cloudflare.  But the story I'm reading is also on FFN... which also uses Cloudflare".

As someone on another forum affected by the outage said, "If it ain't AWS, it's Cloudflare...how am I supposed to NOT get work done?"

[kphoger]

One day Cloudflare and CloudStrike will join forces and send humanity back to the 1980s.

[GaryV]

How long before a bot learns to check those "I am a human" boxes?

[kphoger]

How long before a bot learns to check those "I am a human" boxes?

I mistakenly hit the refresh button on my browser today while I was in Dropbox at work.  It made me log in again.  But first it had me "solve a puzzle".  The puzzle had six iterations to get right.  But I didn't quite understand it during the first iteration, so I only got five out of six correct.  Afterward, it made me redo the one I got wrong, then had me do seven more new ones.  After this five-minute ordeal, it congratulated me on being a human.

After such nonsense, clicking a simple checkbox sounds even better than ever.

[LilianaUwU]

remember when antitrust laws were a thing?

me neither.

[ZLoth]

Unfortunately, I was also affected by the Cloudflare issue, and my server is sitting in a closet, not in a data center. However, the DNS entries are hosted and proxied by Cloudflare, so external to my network, I was getting 500 errors. Because of a internal DNS server which also does ad filtering, I have manual entries there so I could still access my servers... which is by design.

This is different from the AWS/AZure outages last month in that Cloudflare helps against bots and DDOS attacks.

[Scott5114]

How long before a bot learns to check those "I am a human" boxes?

It's not so much an issue of a bot being able to check the box; it's more that what eats up a few seconds for a human user quickly becomes a huge time sink when multiplied across a hundred copies of a bot all trying to access the forum all at once.

[ZLoth]

https://blog.cloudflare.com/18-november-2025-outage/

[Scott5114]

https://blog.cloudflare.com/18-november-2025-outage/

Good on them for being transparent about what happened. Everyone who has written code has dealt with a bug.

[ClassicHasClass]

This morning is a good example of why half the internet being reliant on one company is a bad thing.  "Let's do a quick forum skim... oh deah, Cloudflare is down.  Maybe read some fanfic... oh, AO3 also uses Cloudflare.  But the story I'm reading is also on FFN... which also uses Cloudflare".

One day Cloudflare and CloudStrike will join forces and send humanity back to the 1980s.

Yeah, well, I never had these problems back then with my Commodore 64, so...

We had QuantumLink with our C64. I got banned from it the very first month when my parents got the bill.

[Henry]

This morning is a good example of why half the internet being reliant on one company is a bad thing.  "Let's do a quick forum skim... oh deah, Cloudflare is down.  Maybe read some fanfic... oh, AO3 also uses Cloudflare.  But the story I'm reading is also on FFN... which also uses Cloudflare".

One day Cloudflare and CloudStrike will join forces and send humanity back to the 1980s.

Back to when we called Apple computers Macintoshes...

[kphoger]

I had a weird one the other day.  I typed a post, hit the [Preview] button, and was sent to the Cloudflare verification of my humanity.  No big deal, except that when it finished scanning my DNA, the page that popped up was the 'Start a new topic' page, with all the fields left blank.  Fortunately, I was able to navigate with my browser's BACK button, and my post was still there waiting to be previewed and posted.

[Molandfreak]

I noticed I haven't had a cloudflare pop up in a while. Has my regular IP address been whitelisted?

[Scott5114]

I noticed I haven't had a cloudflare pop up in a while. Has my regular IP address been whitelisted?

We've been messing with the settings to see if we can figure out the right balance that will allow good stuff through and not bad stuff. (The "Cloudflare everyone all the time" setting is great for throwing out all the bots, but there are a few bots that the wiki needs for traffic monitoring and letting Wikimedia Commons know which images we're using so they don't delete them, and we'd like to find a way to keep those around but throw out all the garbage bots.)

[hbelkins]

I noticed I haven't had a cloudflare pop up in a while. Has my regular IP address been whitelisted?

We've been messing with the settings to see if we can figure out the right balance that will allow good stuff through and not bad stuff. (The "Cloudflare everyone all the time" setting is great for throwing out all the bots, but there are a few bots that the wiki needs for traffic monitoring and letting Wikimedia Commons know which images we're using so they don't delete them, and we'd like to find a way to keep those around but throw out all the garbage bots.)

I just tried to do a forum search and got a Cloudflare "bad gateway" error.

[hotdogPi]

I noticed I haven't had a cloudflare pop up in a while. Has my regular IP address been whitelisted?

We've been messing with the settings to see if we can figure out the right balance that will allow good stuff through and not bad stuff. (The "Cloudflare everyone all the time" setting is great for throwing out all the bots, but there are a few bots that the wiki needs for traffic monitoring and letting Wikimedia Commons know which images we're using so they don't delete them, and we'd like to find a way to keep those around but throw out all the garbage bots.)

I just tried to do a forum search and got a Cloudflare "bad gateway" error.

This is a separate issue that started a few months ago where any forum search that's not sufficiently narrowed down (e.g. only one user's posts, search in thread title only, search in one thread, 500-day range) will never complete. After this issue started but before Cloudflare was installed, it would just refuse to load.

[Scott5114]

Our tireless wiki admin rschen7754 has been testing out some new Cloudflare settings that have all but eliminated the bot problem on the wiki side, so it should help the forum too. Please let us know if you have any sort of issues that might be a result of the new settings.

[Plutonic Panda]

Are there any issues in particular that I should be looking out for? So far the site's been running pretty fine for me. I'm using iOS.

[Max Rockatansky]

Are there any issues in particular that I should be looking out for? So far the site's been running pretty fine for me. I'm using iOS.

Cloudfire will tell you there is a bad gateway (happened once last night) or will verify you aren't a bot occasionally.

[hotdogPi]

Are there any issues in particular that I should be looking out for? So far the site's been running pretty fine for me. I'm using iOS.

Cloudfire will tell you there is a bad gateway (happened once last night) or will verify you aren't a bot occasionally.

This stopped happening to me a few weeks ago.

[Max Rockatansky]

Are there any issues in particular that I should be looking out for? So far the site's been running pretty fine for me. I'm using iOS.

Cloudfire will tell you there is a bad gateway (happened once last night) or will verify you aren't a bot occasionally.

This stopped happening to me a few weeks ago.

I only get the bad gateway message now and then.  It isn't anything I'd consider to be that big of a deal.  I just reload the URL and it usually goes through.

[Hot Rod Hootenanny]

Our tireless wiki admin rschen7754 has been testing out some new Cloudflare settings that have all but eliminated the bot problem on the wiki side, so it should help the forum too. Please let us know if you have any sort of issues that might be a result of the new settings.

Rschen7754 is the early leader for "roadgeek of the year."     

[kphoger]

FWIW, I've had zero issues with the forum for quite a while now (other than having to make sure my searches are properly narrow).

[PColumbus73]

Are there any issues in particular that I should be looking out for? So far the site's been running pretty fine for me. I'm using iOS.

Cloudfire will tell you there is a bad gateway (happened once last night) or will verify you aren't a bot occasionally.

This stopped happening to me a few weeks ago.

I only get the bad gateway message now and then.  It isn't anything I'd consider to be that big of a deal.  I just reload the URL and it usually goes through.

I've gotten the bad gateway when I've used the search.