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by Lockal 52 days ago
Here is a bit of meta humor. When I open https://stephvee.ca I see:

  Sorry, you have been blocked. This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks. The action you just performed triggered the security solution. There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data.
Did I ever open this website? I guess no. Did I ever attack this website (or did any AI crawling)? Also no. Implying the allegation is criminal, Cloudflare falsely accused me, should I seek legal counsel?

I still was able to access the article via webarchive. And what I want to say, from my POV, I've done nothing wrong, website owners attack me. I don't see it every day, but I think it is more often than cases when people are kicking AI-powered food delivery robots.
1 comments
st3phvee 51 days ago
That is a standard Cloudflare response when a URL is blocked. It was a temporary block affecting ALL traffic to the URL while I updated the post, not a block targeted at anyone in particular.
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Lockal 51 days ago
No, I am still blocked (for every page on https://stephvee.ca/). "Cloudflare Ray ID: 9efd477aef431473", if it helps somehow. My IP is not in any common blocklist, I experience no errors with other Cloudflare protected websites (using standard Chrome on Linux). It is very likely that stephvee.ca is configured excessively strict (rejecting by OS, or by large IP ranges, or idk)
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st3phvee 51 days ago
Apologies. :( Since you say you've never visited the website before, then that means you're either in one of the countries or in one of the residential IP ranges that I've had to block. I had to do that a while back, as I'd say roughly 99.9% of the traffic I received from those areas was malicious in nature (e.g. constantly spamming the site 24/7 for .env variables and whatnot, as well as crawling every single page on the site hundreds or even thousands of times every day). I couldn't block this traffic at the individual IP level, as there's simply too much of it, and they just move on to a different IP address when they're blocked.

I can't stand the thought of blocking an actual human being who just wants to look at my site, but at the same time, what do you do? Just let the site be hammered by crawlers and scrapers 24/7 for the sake of less than a handful of human visitors every once in a while?

People who don't run websites (I'm not saying this is you, just in general) have no idea how bad the crawling/scraping problem is right now. I don't even WANT to use Cloudflare, but I feel like I have no choice. It's either use Cloudflare, or pay an arm and a leg to host a hobby website and then have all my bandwidth chewed up by the crawlers and scrapers.

The people and companies who run these bots are making the internet such a hostile place. It's especially infuriating that so many of them don't even identify themselves with user agents, and hide behind residential IPs instead.

EDIT: Oh, and I can confirm: I investigated the ray ID, and yes, it was unfortunately a country block that triggered it. I receive a huge amount of bad traffic from your country every single day (mostly credential exploits), and I'm sorry you got caught up unintentionally in that block. I added an exception that should hopefully work, though, in the event that you do still want to visit.

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