[thaumaturgy]

Data point of N+1, but I haven't been able to place online orders at Petco for about a year now because they use some Cloudflare feature that hates my browser + home internet connection. Other Cloudflare-proxied sites seem unaffected, and I'm not doing any botting/crawling, nor do I have any IoT devices on my home network. There's not enough information provided to be able to do any substantive troubleshooting.

This became irritating enough that it caused two side effects: (a) I stopped shopping at Petco, and (b) I moved a pile of sites off of Cloudflare and stopped recommending them, and now sometimes recommend against them.

Cloudflare is still a good, quick, cheap option for sites that receive unusual volumes of malicious traffic, so I'll still recommend them as a solution to some problems. But, they're not a good default.

[sophacles]

So you're mad at Cloudflare because Petco enabled a feature that blocked you? If Petco had developed something in-house that blocked you, would you be mad at the compiler?

[danShumway]

Cloudflare offers this service. If Cloudflare offered a service that enabled Petco to do something amazing would you be grateful to Cloudflare? If Cloudflare advertised on its homepage about blocking a DDOS attack on a website would you say, "meh, Cloudflare wasn't responsible for blocking that attack, they only provided a feature. The website blocked the attack."? If not, then why should Cloudflare be immune from criticism when the opposite happens?

Cloudflare offered Petco the features to do this as a product and makes money off of Petco's usage of those features. I do sympathize with the perspective that ultimately tools need to be somewhat neutral and it can be dangerous to forward around responsibility. But "tools are neutral" can also be taken to an absurd degree. This isn't 5 levels of indirection here and it's not Petco going and installing a neutral piece software that they downloaded from Github. Petco is a client. They're turning on toggles that Cloudflare built into their user interface and advertises as features.

There's some level of moral accountability there for how those features are abused. I'm not saying it should be illegal, I'm not saying it shouldn't be allowed, but Cloudflare is definitely at least eligible for criticism. This is a product, it's not Petco abusing Cloudflare's infrastructure; they're using the product as intended and advertised.

[thaumaturgy]

...no, I've changed my recommendations for Cloudflare because it may prevent ordinary users from using a site, and insufficient information is provided for troubleshooting purposes, and those users are likely not going to go to extraordinary lengths to report the problem. Even if they do report it, the site won't be able to troubleshoot it either. So, if you don't need it, you're probably better off without it.