Get rid of Cloudflare please

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Scruff

Well-Known Member
25 July 2018
925
135
2,389
NSW
At around 4:30 AM this morning, CloudFlare began blocking me from posting for no reason. You really need to question whether using that rubbish is worth it.

From someone with IT qualifications, I can tell you that some of these so called services are well known for causing more problems for genuine users than preventing attacks.
 

Scruff

Well-Known Member
25 July 2018
925
135
2,389
NSW
Okay - a little testing (submitting one paragraph of my post at a time then deleting it) revealed that CloudFlare was blocking my post because it contained an equals sign:

"FA" and "FR" [equals sign] "Fences Act 1968" and "Fences Regulations 2014" respectively.
"ETA" and "ETR" [equals sign] "Electronic Transactions Act 2000" and "Electronic Transactions Regulations 2010" respectively.

After I changed that to the following, it worked:
"FA" and "FR" means "Fences Act 1968" and "Fences Regulations 2014" respectively.
"ETA" and "ETR" means "Electronic Transactions Act 2000" and "Electronic Transactions Regulations 2010" respectively.

Given that this is a secure site (https) and all form data is encrypted, the only way that CloudFlare can block posts based on the content is if they're decrypting the form data submitted to your server - in which case this site has a very serious privacy issue.

Copy/paste the two lines above and change the two occurrances of the word "means" to an equals sign. Then hit "Post Reply" and see what happens.
 
Last edited:

lawanswers

Moderator
Staff member
6 April 2014
111
65
594
Hi @Scruff
Thanks for your message. Cloudflare's content delivery network (CDN) and web application firewall (WAF) is a necessary requirement for any forum operator today to maintain a reasonable level of forum speed and to mitigate a growing number of attack attempts each day. Will work to reproduce the issue you've experienced and add an exception to the WAF. Thank you.