Forum Access Issues & Cloudflare Challenges

Search engines like Google, to someone trying to steal our data, to a company building a contextual database to help advertisers better reach their targets, to AI / LLM training, to someone poking around for security vulnerabilities that they can exploit. It's literally everything you can imagine and much more, plus there are new bots doing new things every day.

In the last week, we've received over 25M requests. Around 10M were likely human, over 5M were verified bots (search engines and whatnot), and the other 10M is now being challenged or blocked. It's insane.

 

Every visitor is essentially given a threat score (IP reputation) based on numerous criteria (the main one being the IP that they're visiting from), and IP addresses for some users might be shared or change often based on whatever network they're currently using.

From Cloudflare:

 

@PapaGoose03 Glad you got it sorted out. Logging in and out will often fix certain issues, as will clearing the cache for the site in your browser.

 

Your IP address seems to change a lot on a daily basis. And each IP has a different threat level. Challenges are also unique to your specific device, browser, and session.

But I’m going to see if I can make some further adjustments on certain pages/actions.

 

When this happens, are you liking a bunch of posts in a row?

(Also, your IP address often changes multiple times a day.)

 

@beergoot Looks like your IP address changed a dozen times in the last 24 hours and many of the IPs resolve to a VPN service. Not sure which ones are your Linux laptop.

As for the POST error, there's a bunch of forum actions use the POST method, like saving your post in the background as a draft when you're typing up a post, likes, etc. I just made some adjustments specifically to these actions and how Cloudflare handles them.

Let me know if you notice any improvements.