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Comment by jakobe | Hacker News Reader

I stopped using Cloudflare because of their "protection service". They would block certain visitors, seemingly by random, and present them with a captcha. The page presenting the captcha had big ads on them.

There's no way that it's acceptable to show ads and captchas to potential customers, before they can even see my website.

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I believe paid accounts can customize the challenge page, but moreover even free accounts can turn the security completely off so no one ever sees it.

Can't you disable any of the features you don't want? I agree that it's tacky to have ads on this page, but what would you expect if you're on the free service?

Yeah, at one stage about 2 years ago they blocked the whole of South Africa, because most web traffic comes from a small number of transparent proxies from each ISP (bandwidth is pretty scarce here). Incredibly irritating

Were you on the free or paid plan?

It shouldn't matter though. They are visiting your site...

I was on the free plan. I didn't see any reason to pay for the service, because the free plan had everything I wanted. It seemed too good to be true. Until I saw that captcha page. I was surprised, as I had read all the docs, and it was nowhere mentioned that ads would be shown by cloudflare to my customers. Made me feel amateurish. I immediately deactivated cloudflare and decided to be more careful with 'free' services in the future.

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