This doesn’t sound like bullshit to me. Serving a static text file that is primarily used by applications is not in line with their terms of service.
Cloudflare provides a significant service to the free and open web by subsidizing the hosting costs of static content for websites. They give that away for free under what appears to be reasonable terms.
But it is web content, really. A txt file renders fine in every browser.
Many websites also push text through HTML as part of AJAXy stuff. If they actually enforced this for all sites, their service would no longer be usable.
You're missing the point. The service cloudflare donates isn't free. That is the whole point of EasyList’s post. There are plenty of comments on this submission doing back of napkin math to find a reasonable monthly cost for hosting that text file. If you want to donate that bandwidth - go for it.
But the comments here about Cloudflare’s ToS read a lot like folks feeling entitled to getting bandwidth for for free. Cloudflare is providing a very specific service for free, and it does a lot of good.
It would be great if Cloudflare decided to donate. But I’d re-evaluate your stance if you’re feeling entitled to their resources.
You're missing the point. If Cloudflare's issue is with bandwidth, then they should say so and leave it at that, not conjure up this pathetic excuse about .txt files somehow not being "web content". Does wrapping that data in <html><body><pre> </pre></body></html> magically fix the bandwidth issues?
Just making a file valid HTML doesn't make it "web content". This file is being fetched by an application, not being viewed by a user.
I'm not sure this is the most reasonable rule but there are definitely some benificial aspects to it. For example the load on human-viewed content is limited by how often people want to view it. Not how often their browser wants to redownload it.
> Just making a file valid HTML doesn't make it "web content".
By Cloudflare's rationale it does.
> For example the load on human-viewed content is limited by how often people want to view it. Not how often their browser wants to redownload it.
Bandwidth is bandwidth. If 100,000,000 humans want to download a 10KB text/html page v. 100,000,000 programs wanting to download a 10KB text/plain file, both within the same time period, then that's going to be the same degree of load on Cloudflare's end.
Actually you're missing the point. It doesn't seem like many people are condemning Cloudflare for not serving a bandwidth-heavy file for free (FTA: "CloudFlare does not allow non-enterprise users use that much traffic").
Rather what's being condemned is this nonsense customer service characterization of a text file as somehow not "web content". Easylist.txt is a data file that could just as easily be in JSON (and be larger). Furthermore, as it stands easylist.txt actually looks like it's a valid text/html file, as browsers generally don't insist on <html>/<body> tags. So from both directions it seems like the customer service drone has thrown out this nonsense just to short circuit having to do their job.
I like the HN approach of taking a charitable interpretation of their message.
Clearly EasyList lived on their free tier for a long time without interruption. Only when they used excessive bandwidth did ToS enforcement happen. When they reached out for support, the support agent rightly pointed out that this isn't a website file.
Reading the ToS, the support agents message appears to be correct. Text files are fine (as is pretty much any format) as long as it isn't the main focus of the HTTP server Cloudflare is fronting. Robots.txt would be fine, turning the list into XML or HTML would not be fine. In this case, the text file isn't there to support the web content of Easy List - it's distributing a text file to applications.
The agent could have added additional context but their message is valid.
You're still conflating "free tier" with "not a web file". According to the article, they are separate issues and Cloudflare wouldn't be willing to host easylist.txt even on a paid plan.
Meanwhile -
1. easylist.txt is used by every single web page I visit. So the overall purpose argument fails.
2. Web pages commonly use non-directly-renderable data files in formats like JSON or XML, so the file purpose argument fails.
3. Text files are and continue to be one of the major formats displayed by browsers. So the file type argument fails.
4. The size of the file is in line with other files cached by Cloudflare. So that argument fails.
If the Cloudflare support rep said "we just don't feel like doing business with you", that would be a different thing. But instead they're throwing out some arbitrarily-framed unfalsifiable reason as if it's a logical justification. And no, customer service drones and corporate policies don't deserve a fundamental benefit of the doubt, per contra proferentem (ambiguous terms should be construed against the drafter). It's impossible to know what they actually mean here besides "we don't like it", and that is the problem.
But it's not JSON or HTML. And it's not meant for browsers. It's clearly a dataset as a text file and not meant as "web(page) content". What's nonsense about that when it's completely accurate?
Interestingly, one could host this on a WWW frontend for Git. Then you'd only need to download (say a daily) diff. Why download the entire list when you can match checksum?
Cloudflare provides a significant service to the free and open web by subsidizing the hosting costs of static content for websites. They give that away for free under what appears to be reasonable terms.