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The AI company Perplexity is complaining their bots can't bypass Cloudflare's firewall
(www.searchenginejournal.com)
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this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2025
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It's insane that anyone would side with Cloudflare here. To this day I cant visit many websites like nexusmods just because I run Firefox on Linux. The Cloudflare turnstile just refreshes infinitely and has been for months now.
Cloudflare is the biggest cancer on the web, fucking burn it.
Linux and Firefox here. No problem at all with Cloudflare, despite having more or less as much privacy preserving add-on as possible. I even spoof my user agent to the latest Firefox ESR on Linux.
Something's may be wrong with your setup.
I suspect a lot of it comes down to your ISP. Like the original commentor I also frequently can't pass CloudFlare turnstile when on Wifi, although refreshing the page a few times usually gets me through. Worst case on my phone's hotspot I can much more consistently pass. It's super annoying and combined with their recent DNS outage has totally ruined any respect I had for CloudFlare.
Interesting video on the subject: https://youtu.be/SasXJwyKkMI
Thats not how it works. Cf uses thousands of variables to estimate a trust score and block people so just because it works for you doesn't mean it works.
Same goes the other way. It's not because it doesn't work for you that it should go away.
That technology has its uses, and Cloudflare is probably aware that there are still some false positive, and probably is working on it as we write.
The decision is for the website owner to take, taking into consideration the advantages of filtering out a majority of bots and the disadvantages of loosing some legitimate traffic because of false positives. If you get Cloudflare challenge, chances are that he chosed that the former vastly outclass the later.
Now there are some self-hosted alternatives, like Anubis, but business clients prefer SaaS like Cloudflare to having to maintain their own software. Once again it is their choices and liberty to do so.
lmao imagine shilling for corporate Cloudflare like this. Also false positive vs false negative are fundamentally not equal.
The main issue with Cloudflare is that it's mostly bullshit. It does not report any stats to the admins on how many users were rejected or any false positive rates and happily put's everyone under "evil bot" umbrella. So people from low trust score environments like Linux or IPs from poorer countries are under significant disadvantage and left without a voice.
I'm literally a security dev working with Cloudflare anti-bot myself (not by choice). It's a useful tool for corporate but a really fucking bad one for the health of the web, much worse than any LLM agent or crawler, period.
Ah, the good old "you dont agree with me so you must be shilling for X" argument. I suppose you are shilling for the bots then, am I right ?
Linux user here, Cloudflare hasn't blocked access to a single page for me unless I use a VPN, which then can trigger it.
I'm on Linux with Firefox and have never had that issue before (particularly nexusmods which I use regularly). Something else is probably wrong with your setup.
Thirded. All three (Linux, FF, nexus)
ZERO ISSUES.
"Wrong with my setup" - thats not how internet works.
I'm based in south east asia and often work on the road so IP rating probably is the final crutch in my fingerprint score.
Either way this should be no way acceptible.
That is exactly how the internet works. That's always how the internet has worked.
In my case, it's usually the VPN.
It happened to me before until I did a Google search. It was my VPN web protection. It was too " over protective".
Check your security settings, antivirus and VPN
omg ur a hacker
Did you mean Edge on Windows? 'Cause if so, welcome in!