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Comment by toastal | Hacker News Reader

Putting everything 'behind Cloudflare' isn't a panacea. By merely living outside the West, I'm getting Geo blocked from 'normal' news sites and constantly having to solve hCAPTCHAs to solve riddles for some AI algo without compensation. It's such a burden and I find myself giving up pretty often. GeoIP blocking is what prevented me from getting my voter information out of my last domicile. Running everything through Cloudflare or similar also contributes to the concept of letting the internet be centralized around a few choke points that can hurt free speech (both the good and bad kind) and when they go out (which did recently) a large swath of the internet comes with it.

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Does Cloudflare's "Privacy Pass" browser plugin help at all? It's advertised as reducing the number of hCaptchas you need to solve by a factor of 30, but I rarely see hCaptchas anywhere on my connection so I can't really evaluate myself.

I agree with you. But, what solution do you propose for independent solo developers or people who wish to run a blog instead of using FB, Twitter and co to create content? Cloudflare may not be perfect, but it prevented me from shutting down my solo operation without putting a massive cost burden on me. When the first time DDoS hit, I had to beg one of those large cloud companies to reduce bandwidth costs. It took them forever to forgive that abuse and price, which was not my fault, and I was given a strong warning not to repeat such an issue again. There is no easy solution to this problem. At least with Cloudflare, people like me can stay online, but it does cause a problem for a bad IP reputation.

TL;DR: I won't expose any of my projects or API directly these days due to spam, ddos and other abuse.

For commenting or forums the best solution IME is to require moderation review for all new users before showing the posts anywhere. You can also add a super simple "CAPTCHA" that is just a text field with a question easily answerable to any human looking at your site (e.g. name of $thing that your site is about without mentioning $thing in the question itself) to reduce load from non-targeted automated spam.

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