What percent of users are you losing to Cloudflare?

[elwebmaster]

Cloudflare used to be a "do no evil" company which furthered the mission of self-hosting and indie developers; they were first to offer IPv4 to IPv6 reverse proxy, then they spearheaded the migration to SSL everywhere. Yet, nowadays the company has changed. They have been blocking IPv6 by Hurricane-Electric for years, essentially preventing a ton of indie use cases. But that's not all, with their "captcha" product they have started to block a ton of legitimate users from accessing content just because the sites chose to use Cloudflare. Over the years I have changed from a proponent to detractor of this company. I wonder how many founders are aware that they are losing users due to relying on Cloudflare, if they have a way to even measure this loss? Often the Cloudflare captcha appears on sites before the backend is even contacted. In my case there is no obvious reason why this captcha fails, sometimes it depends which room in my apartment I am in, clearly poor engineering. I am sure I am not alone. So can you measure, do you know, or do you care how many users you are losing to Cloudflare?

[1oooqooq]

everyone shows captcha way too early. and have zero understanding of vpns.

captcha used to be to prevent abuse, now it's just a stop gap to not break the bank with aws bills just to answer the millions of crawlers out there ignoring robots.txt

but nobody measures anything. so very few people can actually answer you.

[EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK → 1oooqooq]

I think it's another gift from AI. Nowadays if you try to access the web from anything except a residential computer in a trusted geo location, here is a captcha or just outright ban for you.

[1oooqooq → EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK]

true. interesting how ai brought an era of crawlers authors who probably never even heard of robots.txt let alone respect it.