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Comment by navanchauhan | Hacker News Reader

Crawling a Cloudflare powered website is basically impossible without needing to do some bodges as to how to crawl it.

How can you expect someone to crawl a bunch of websites if they are actively blocked from accessing it? Now, you might say users can whitelist bots in their robots.txt file but then again will the person creating the engine individually ask companies to allow them to crawl?

Also, slightly unrelated but Cloudflare protected websites are almost impossible to access via tor, the captcha never succeeds.

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> Also, slightly unrelated but Cloudflare protected websites are almost impossible to access via tor, the captcha never succeeds.

Yes, I've never understood why it's seemingly so important to CAPTCHA me before serving me less than 100kb of read only plain jane HTML. What sort of "attack" is this stopping? I'm pretty sure the CAPTCHA itself is bigger than half the sites it blocks me from reading.

If you are building a search engine and getting blocked you can always contact me and I'll make sure that the teams that work on bot detection and DDoS are aware. We would like to know because we should not be blocking a legit crawler like this.

For every developer that sees this message, a few dozen will have given up.

Exactly this. Cloudflare actively blocks legit crawlers. It shouldn't be dependent on seeing some random hn comment from some random at cloudflare to get that fixed.

Say I’m interested in building a small scale domain-specific search engine and only just started development. There’s no prototype yet and may never be. In this situation, how do you determine it’s a legit crawler?

And what about crawlers with even more limited scopes (targeting only a handful of sites) that they can’t possibly be called search engines? Are they ever considered legit?

Be a good netizen? Respect robots.txt. Don't lie in your User-Agent. Don't crawl at a ridiculous rate. All those are a good starting point.

Do you not realize the more fundamental problem with you, as a company, essentially being the one who gatekeeps crawler access to the web?

I use cloudflare out of my free will because there's malicious traffic out there, and I have enough control over everything.

They're only a gatekeeper because sites voluntarily enter into commercial agreements with them. There's no coercion or manipulation like Google AMP.

Customers pay for this as a feature. Why would they feel it's a fundamental problem? There's nothing that says admins need to let you crawl their site.

If people intend this to happen, sure . But how many people who put their sites behind Cloudflare is aware that this might be a side effect?

I would wager that most people that purchase Cloudflare are probably aware of the features it offers

Note the distinction. I'd wager that the vast majority of sites behind Cloudflare are not paying customers, and have not paid much attention beyond "hides my server IP slightly and stops DDOS's", without having thought more - or at all - about the wider implications.

This is exactly the case.

I think the problem is some IPs just straight-up always get CAPTCHAs from Cloudflare even if one’s a good netizen, respect robots.txt, not crawl at ridiculous rate, and not lie in the user agent. One reason is shared IP, which disproportionally affects people from third world countries as their ISPs don’t have enough IPv4 for everyone; but it also happened mysteriously to at least one dedicated IP I used in the past. Your confrontational tone is rather unfortunate, and the problem of course is that you don’t guarantee anything even if the user has done nothing wrong, as is manifest from the choice of the phrase “starting point”.

Then the problem has nothing to do with your crawling.

What is a “ridiculous rate”? Where is it documented?

Even then, I've run into issues with scraping several sites for the reverse image search engine I operate. Luckily, in most cases I have been able to get in touch with the people running those sites to get a rule added for my IPs to allow them through. That's not scalable though, and limits where I can scrape/crawl from. Even something as simple as checking a site for updates every hour or two tends to get blocked after a few times. TBH, one of the only things I have found which helps is lying in the user agent and copying CF cookies. Luckily, I haven't had to play with that for a few months due to whitelisting, so not sure it it would still help. Things change rapidly.

What makes a web crawler "legit?"

When I had a site that had millions of pages, I found that sites like Baidu would crawl my site as often, if not more often than Google.

I already felt the relationship with Google was parasitic, but I looked through my logs and never found a single hit that came from Baidu and many of the other search engines that would overload my site.

I was looking at a substantial part of the site running costs going to supporting web crawlers that were not doing anything (1) to help me, or (2) to help end users (if they don't want to send Chinese users to an English-speaking web site, why crawl the site?)

So like it or not I am inclined to only allow Google and Bing in the robots.txt because Google is the only site that sends a significant amount of traffic and because Bing sends some, and Google needs some competition.

There are web crawler behaviors that are annoying: harvesting email addresses, overloading your site, etc. But how do you know who is doing something wrong with the data and who is just collecting it do do nothing with it? (Probably 95% of web crawling ex. Google.)

> So like it or not I am inclined to only allow Google and Bing in the robots.txt because Google is the only site that sends a significant amount of traffic and because Bing sends some, and Google needs some competition.

This sounds like you're onto a reasonable “legit” factor: does the crawler honor robots.txt? Baidu would be legit because they don't lie about their identity and if you put a rule in your robots.txt file they'll honor it.

What's the best way to contact you?

jgc @ cloudflare

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