Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

You can email me (jgc@cloudflare.com) the HAR file and I'll get people to look at it.



Thank you very much! Email sent at 11:38 CT although it's 1.5MB so check your spam.


I have received it, spoken to the team and they are looking at it.


I very much appreciate your help and I'm glad to do any other diagnostics. However, respectfully, I think the deeper issue is the lack of community support. On the verification page, there is no "help" button. Even with my motivation to find the community support page (which is also non-trivial), there was no response on my original community post and it was auto-closed which was particularly offensive to me (at least just keep it open). In my opinion, something of the magnitude of "we're possibly going to lock people out of large parts of the internet" deserves more careful engagement with the public.

I also understand Linux is an obscure use case but I do wonder how many other "normal" use cases out there have been ensnared. Given the lack of a "help" link on the verification page, an average user is powerless.


I'm chatting with folks about how the community stuff is being handled. Linux isn't obscure (it's widely used internally, too!).


And in a days time this thread will be off the main page and nothing will of been done.

Hows the "chatting" going?


No news yet; however, one of the other HN comments suggested creating a new Firefox profile using about:profiles and that seems to have worked (whereas clearing cache/cookies didn't work), although I'm still trying to find the root cause because it's going to be annoying migrating to the new profile. I think the deeper issue stands that the process to find the cause of why CloudFlare is blocking large parts of the internet for me is too opaque, so I hope CloudFlare has a broader solution such as a diagnostic code or detailed help page.

Right now I'm reviewing about:config for non-standard settings. I did find that I did set general.useragent.override at some point and I forgot about it; however, unsetting it didn't help. I went through all other non-default settings and haven't found anything yet.


Update: The problem has been resolved. I can no longer reproduce the issue. I'm not sure if there was a fix on CloudFlare's side or if it was because I cleared cookies and cache and restarted my browser after resetting general.useragent.override.

If it was the latter, I'm sorry to CloudFlare as this was user error.

However, I do think the two meta points still stand:

1. Better diagnostics: perhaps a FAQ page that lists common issues such as an overridden general.useragent.override, etc. (obviously without giving anything away to bad people, but I'm sure certain things such as this can be pointed out)

2. Better responsiveness in the community forum particularly to this category of errors which blocks public internet activity.


I don't think this is a user error, nor was it ever in the first place. Cloudflare shouldn't of glitched in such a way. The service should accommodate however the browser is configured.

Call me skeptical but does feels more of an "okay this feature we wanted is breaking stuff and people are noticing. Lets turn it off for now".

Something new will break in probably a month.


I regularly get these infinity captchas on Firefox as well. A couple of days ago I noticed that switching to a different Firefox container let's me pass the captchas.


I had the same experience within an app to manage doctors appointments on iOS. For some reason I was locked out of the app by cloudflare and I ended up having to call my doctor's secretary to move my appointment. It took 15 minutes on the phone for something that should have taken less than a minute within the app. Even my friend who worked for that company had no way to fix it. I don't know whether to blame the app developers or cloudflare here.

I wouldn't call Linux an obscure use case, it's particularly great for workstations and old laptops that struggle with running Windows.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: