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Comment by Alupis | Hacker News Reader

Not every website is the same, folks.

> You are literally complaining about handling 1 request every 2 seconds

I don't know where this came from. The inconsiderate bots tend to flood your server, likely someone doing some sort of naïve parallel crawl. Not every website has a full-stack in-house team behind it to implement custom server-side throttles and what-not either.

However, like I mentioned already, if every single visitor is getting the challenge, then either the site is experiencing an attack right now, or the operator has the security settings set too high. Some commonly-targeted websites seem to keep security settings high even when not actively experiencing an attack. To those operators, remaining online is more important than slightly annoying some small subset of visitors 1 time.

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> crawls every single webpage (and we have 10's of thousands) every couple days

100,000 / (86400 * 2) = 0.58 req/sec.

I acknowledge that those requests are likely bursty, but you were complaining as if the total amount was the problem. If the instantaneous request rate is the actual problem, you should be able to throttle on that, no?

I can totally believe your site has a bunch of accidental complexity that is harder to fix than just pragmatically hassling users. But it'd be better for everyone if this were acknowledged explicitly rather than talked about as an inescapable facet of the web.

> But if the instantaneous request rate is the problem, you should be able to filter on that, no?

Again, not every website is the same, and not every website has a huge team behind it to deal with this stuff. Spending 30-something developer hours implementing custom rate limiting and throttling, distributed caching, gateways, etc is absurd for probably 99% of websites.

You can pay Cloudflare $0.00 and get good enough protection without spending a second thinking about the problem. That is why you see it commonly...

If your website does not directly generate money for you or your business, then sinking a bunch of resources into it is silly. You will likely never experience this sort of challenge on an ecommerce site, for instance... but a blog or forum? Absolutely.

Actually I get hassled all the time on various ecommerce sites. Because once centralizing entities make an easy to check "even moar security" box, people tend to check it lest they get blamed for not doing so. And then it gets stuck on since the legitimate users that closed the page out of frustration surely get counted in the "attackers protected against" metric!

I'd say you're really discounting the amount of hassle people get from these challenges. Some sites hassle users every visit. Some hassle users every few pages. Some hassle logged in users. Some just go into loops (as in OP). Some don't even pop up a challenge and straight up deny based on IP address!

And since we're talking about abstract design, why can't Cloudflare et al change their implementations to throttle based on individual IPs, rather than blanket discriminating against more secure users? Maybe you personally have taken the best option available to you. But that doesn't imply the larger dynamic is justifiable.

> why can't Cloudflare et al change their implementations to throttle based on individual IPs, rather than blanket discriminating against more secure users

Cloudflare does not do this - I've made that point several times. The website operator either has the security setting cranked to a paranoid level (which is not the default, btw), or they are experiencing an attack. Those are the only two scenarios where Cloudflare is going to inject a challenge as frequently as you assert.

Normally Cloudflare will only challenge after unusual behavior has been detected, such as inhuman numbers of page requests within a short duration, or the URL/forms are being manipulated, etc. The default settings are fairly unobtrusive in my experience.

If you are also complaining about generic captchas on forms and what-not, that's a different thing entirely. Those exists as anti-bot measures, naturally, but also as anti-human measures. We simply do not want a pissed customer to send us 900 contact-us form requests one drunken evening...

> Cloudflare does not do this - I've made that point several times. The website operator either has the security setting cranked to a paranoid level

This is a bit of intent laundering. By Cloudflare providing ridiculous options, some people are going to take it because more "security" must be better.

> Normally Cloudflare will only challenge after unusual behavior has been detected, such as ...

or people using more secure browsers like Firefox with resistFingerprinting = 1. I suspect this is a significant blind spot for site operators. Have you personally tried your own site with RFP=1, TOR browser bundle, VPN from a datacenter IP, etc?

> generic captchas on forms ... exists as anti-bot measures, naturally, but also as anti-human measures. We simply do not want a pissed customer to send us 900 contact-us form requests one drunken evening

My whole point is it's a bit disingenuous to throw out large quantities of things as the argument, when the hassles are often thrown up on the very first request. I'm not complaining about the sites that throw up CAPTCHAs after the third failed login, but rather the ones that do it on the first attempt!

And sure, I don't have a good map of which types of hassles are specifically Cloudflare versus others of their ilk. And I certainly don't know how often Cloudflare doesn't cause problems, as it doesn't stand out. I just know there is too much indefensible surveillance-based user-hassling in general and OP's anecdote is right in line with my standard browsing experience on many sites these days.

> or people using more secure browsers like Firefox with resistFingerprinting = 1. I suspect this is a significant blind spot for site operators. Have you personally tried your own site with RFP=1

Yes, and it is not an issue for us. Again, this is up to site operators to decide for themselves. The defaults are sane, and Cloudflare makes it very clear what each level of their security configuration does. It is up to the site operator to decide how they want their site to behave. Perhaps, simply avoid sites that bother you? That list will grow by the day, unfortunately.

> TOR browser bundle, VPN from a datacenter IP, etc

Nobody, and I mean nobody, cares about this traffic. We're in the ecommerce space, so perhaps by that I mean nobody in the ecommerce space cares. We do not want TOR traffic. We do not want random-cloud-ip-vpn traffic. These are more often than not where our fraud bots/attempts originate, and we are not alone.

Recognize, if you are using TOR, or browsing regularly via a datacenter IP VPN - you are in an extreme minority and unfortunately lots of folks before you have used these services for bad things.

I personally like TOR, and VPNs. This is no slight against them - but the facts are undeniable here.

> surveillance-based user-hassling

You also referenced canvas-based fingerprinting, and seem to assume that's how these things work. Some might, but many are much more dumb than that. Usage-pattern based challenges are fairly simple when you understand what normal traffic looks like.

They may recrawl every 2 days and make 100,000 parallel requests.

In my experience, if bots start flooding a server, it's the ISP/hosting provider that gets angry and contacts the owner first. )

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