this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2026
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It's fucking irritating to have to visit the same websites you used to just fine a year or so ago now becomes slow and require you to spend a good 5-10 seconds on a fucking "confirm you are human" check (as if google and co doesn't give us enough of that shit already). Worse, it doesn't even work sometimes, often loops, and if you're on a different/niche browser? Good luck.
Owners of the said websites don't have to use this check.
What do you propose instead to combat AI companies stealing from your site?
I am trying htaccess at the moment, so far I am not getting bots in my logs. But I don't see anything bad on using Cloudflare. But I don't understand people hating Cloudflare for the tool they offer. I also find it annoying, hence I don't run it on my stuff.
Oh, yeah, and if you block cloudflare.com third party JS and whatnot, guess what? that doesn't work! it just displays a vaguely patronizing error message.
(It used to just say "unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed" which was significantly less offensive, IMO. Treated you like a person who knows what you're doing, which you are if you've decided to manually block cloudflare.com, and tells you what the exact domain at issue is if you feel like giving in.)
-- Frost
Could be, could be not. I honestly don't remember what that style comes from. Got a screenshot of the entire error page? Maybe there's additional info on it somewhere.
(If this is the entire page... try zooming out? Looks like they might have borked their page design slightly.)
-- Frost
That's it. Btw it's from archive.is. I tried following a link from an article given by a lemmy.ml comrade.
Okay, that looks like not-Cloudflare. In large part because of the captcha; Cloudflare doesn't use Google's, they have their own.
I wonder if this is somehow from Google. Which... would they then be triggering this from third party JS or something? I don't know.
-- Frost
This doesn't address the issue with Cloudflare. Yes, they provide an anti-crawler service for web hosts. However, essentially every website needs this, and it's done regardless of Cloudflare. It's just a fact of the modern internet.
I practically never come across these checks outside of google and cloudflare.
Have you seen the anime Canadian girl for Anubis? That's the big non-cloudflare alternative.
That thing is so much better. Usually a split second and I don't have to shift browsers for it.
I mean yeah this doesn’t address the annoyances we must all live with but no; most Lemmings are not web admins and have no fucking idea what has happened to the internet in the last 5 years. It’s very behind the scenes to them, as this thread shows - most people think “CloudFlare bad because they make me prove I’m human” and not “CloudFlare bad because they read all proxied traffic unencrypted and pass that info to whoever wants it”
You're a dumbass if you think that justifies making the internet unusable.
Look, man, the internet isn't for users anymore, it is for bits to get blocked.