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by kabacha 2998 days ago
> Our mission is to help build a better Internet.

I've been working a lot with open data and I have huge problem with Cloudflare ruining open internet with bot protection and such. The issue I have is that public data is public, be it bot or human.

I'm having real issue with you guys saying that your mission is to better the internet when you break shitton of floss apps that are essentially harmless and people who want to do harm, crawl at huge rates for commercial purposes break your systems like it's made of twigs. I'm saying this as a person who works on both sides and can't help but call you out.

So sorry unless you turn to non-profit I'm really not buying your "helping the internet" song.

1 comments

I agree. Part of what makes the web the web is that anyone has to be able to crawl its data, and build new technology on top.

As long as Cloudflare blocks that, it's hostile.

Maybe a way to register as spider with Cloudflare, and get a token that one passes in the header, with strict rate limits would be much better than the current solution of just showing captchas.