Cloudflare is making website access difficult
So I dont really come to this forum much anymore, but I do occasionally come by to see if there are any impending updates that might cause me more frustration with my various NI products, but lately when I use chrome or firefox to visit the page, Cloudflare stops website access and thinks about "whether Im human or not" for 10-15 minutes if I leave it that long. Eventually the website comes up. Is this happening to others?
Edit: when the page eventually loads, many images and formatting styles do not load, causing the page to look like garbage. Eventually those images do load, but this is not a website I will visit much anymore if this doesnt cease.
Is Cloudflare and all its hassles and points of failure worth it? Are there that many hackers trying to DoS NI dotcom all the time? Something tells me not.
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Yes Im having to jump through hoops to get in as well with this stupid stupid captcha nonsense. Started, I dont know, about a month ago. Im on FF here. I dont wait though, I have to enable some extra cloudfare stuff to run in my browser which I have set up in "hard mode". A royal pain if you ask me. The old forum was great. There was none of this going on.
There's been some ridiculous spam attacks on this forum of recent times, to the tune of literally pages and pages of spam. These were all in foreign language, then recently they got another spate. I guess this is their way of trying to curtail it. I dont have to do this stuff when Im on other sites, so it baffles me why NI should be so different.
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I'm with you guys. I posted about it on here recently, because after months of being able to access the forum directly, I started getting the "human check" tick box, which would have been bearable if it had worked correctly. Instead it just went into a "tick the box" loop.
I thought I'd tracked it down to one of my Firefox extensions, but it still occurs sometimes. I find turning random extensions off seems to help get past it, but there's no logic to it.
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Thanks for the replies. This did just start happening to me, and wasnt something I saw until maybe a month or so ago. Usually it was very brief (1-2 seconds), but now it just loops and loops.
It just happened to me again (firefox) as I tried to follow this notification. I wont touch any browser modifications to make Cloudflare less annoying, and I'll just stop coming. My firefox is totally defaulted - I have no extensions, and Ive mostly stopped using chrome and of course edge.
Yeah, Ive seen the spam posts here, but as a net/sysadmin, Im struggling to see how Cloudflare (DNSsec/distributed DNS) stops spam bot automated registrations that do not hit any DoS threshold at the network layer. I wasnt aware that Cloudflare was also an application security product. Automating forum and website (application) rules and policies seems to be the best way to stop that, while Cloudflare and other products seem aimed at actual brute force DoS/DDoS. But what do I know, Ive just been managing network and systems infrastructure since 1997.
Some of those spam posts stayed up for days. I kept flagging them, as did others, but NI staff took like 12 hours to act on them. That is a separate issue….
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Mine has changed a tad. I had to check a box to prove Im a human but now it does that automatically for me, but first I'm always told to allow "challenges.cloudfront or cloudflare" which I do temporarily, hence I get the message every time (my default deny policy). I shudder to think what people are unwittingly allowing in their browsing sessions to websites they go to. When you use a "default deny" method you soon find out.
I wasnt aware that Cloudflare was also an application security product.
Same. Its my understanding that captchas/ prove you're a human - type methodologies are more about tracking users. Similarly I also have to allow cookies just to visit this forum without logging in.
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24,030,148 active websites use Cloudflare worldwide.
4,332 out of 10,000 most popular and important websites globally, use Cloudflare.
And yes, it has great security options, apart of a lot of other benefits.Also:
- Today's networks has almost nothing in common with networks from 1997 etc.
- Cloudflare check, takes 4-5 seconds maximum. If it takes more for some of you, then your problem is elsewhere, in your browser or/and your computer.
- To avoid Cloudflare check, simply do not delete forum cookies when you clear your browser cache.
- If you are using a VPN service and every time, you are connecting from a different area (thus with different IP address), you must accept the fact the Cloudflare (or any other similar service) will always check you, every single time. The only way to avoid this, as far as i know, is, if your VPN has an option to keep the same IP Address, activate it.
- Captchas/ "prove you're a human" etc. are very serious and helpful tools for the "anti-spam war". They have nothing to do with tracking users.
One more thing:
If the "when the page eventually loads, many images and formatting styles do not load, causing the page to look like garbage." is the case for you, then you have a seriously outdated system, or very low memory, or a very slow internet connection, or you never clean your cache and other web rubbish… or something similar, or a combination of the above.
I work with a 7 years old Windows system (but perfectly tuned) and just 16GB of memory and even my network is consider slow these days, just 50mbps… and yet, all it takes, is just 2 seconds to reach the forum in "full glory" in the rare cases that i stumble upon Cloudflare (usually when i disconnect my router -therefor when my IP address changes). Oh, and 0 seconds on every day use. Just click n' load…0 -
There are billions of websites.
Ive worked as a network engineer or net/sysadmin/IT manager since 1998. I very much understand WHO has adopted WHAT and WHY over the last 20 years alone, and just because the most "popular and important" websites (read: facebook, twitter, citibank, federal government, etc etc) use it, does not mean the flaws widely seen in this 'DoSAAS' system do not exist, it just means IT infrastructure isnt built using the same core architectural philosophies.
The "single point of failure is bad" methodology has been replaced by "is it cheap? Are the others using it? Do we have to manage it internally? Do we have plausible deniability if doing it this way breaks production systems? Does the CTO have collegiate connections to the CTO at Crowdflare?"
-the problem is not in my browser or my system, and I would dare Cloudflare (or whoever you are) to try to show that it is. Is Cloudflare unable to support the Firefox (Mozilla) browser? lol perhaps it would play nicer with Edge or Chrome? Not my problem, or the problem of millions of others.
-an outdated system or low memory? This really IS the new philosophy for brand management here, isnt it: blame the customer first and foremost. Assume every customer has egregiously misconfigured, under-powered system connected to a horrible ISP. Is that right? Read above: the whole net/sysadmin thing.
-Ive seen Cloudflare checks at other websites previously. On chrome, ffox, and even edge, and none of those checks took more than 1 second. Then, just after Cloudflare bombed many large companies around the world because of a change made to MILLIONS OF RUNNING PRODUCTION systems, this "checking" behavior began taking much, much longer, but only on NI website. I dont really see this tech on many sites that I visit.
-I dont use VPN
-I havent deleted cookies nor had ffox automatically do so.
Again - I can just visit less until your brand figures this out. This^^ isnt the way to address my concerns, but thanks.
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And still — is Cloudflare being used here for protection against DoS, or against forum spammers? Still not entirely clear to me if its even properly implemented lol.
And I still have the same throttling behaviors when accessing NI's CDN via Native Access. Ive made 2 posts about this and also commented on threads others have made about this same issue.
To this day, and for 4 years now - at 2 different home addresses across the state I live in, 2 different ISPs both copper and fiber, routed through sacramento and later routed through LA, across 2 different workstations and increasingly powerful routers - all of this results in 12+ hours downloading Komplete libraries instead of 3-4 because transfers start at 50-80MB/sec… then slowly squeeze off down to 1MB/sec and remain there for the duration. No other site I visit has this problem, and I regularly transfer data at around 100-120MB/sec. That's megaBYTES. NI says "maybe its your computer. Maybe its your ISP. Install this tool" and nothing conclusive. For years. (psst I know what throttling looks like. I dont care WHY its happening, just that it is)
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@Milkman you shared some very good points of view and a lot of useful info, though clearly you have almost no idea about the vast amount of benefits of using Cloudflare. Well… i use it on 3 of my websites and the difference between using it and not using it, its enormous! Security is just a small fraction of what Cloudflare can do, in fact, most websites use it for speed, since it owns the fastest DNS Servers in the world (faster even than Google ones)… Check the image below, it comes from one of my websites. On the left side you can get a small idea about what Cloudflare offers:
Anyway, the case here, the fact, is that according to your description, obviously you do have a much better and faster system than mine, and much faster ISP and your settings are optimal. Also, notice that i do use Firefox on Windows 10 as you, and i can tell you that Cloudflare works perfect with Firefox.
Then, how you explain the fact that my system loads the forum + Cloudflare in 2 second and yours take 10 minutes? Another fact that i know is, that for at least 90% of the 74.000+ forum members here, the loading time is 4-5 second, and even for the few that still use old systems and browsers, it still takes less than 10 seconds to load! Those are facts. …and then, you came and say that your super system and your super fast ISP needs 10 minutes??? Sorry but I will only state the obvious here, that if you indeed have such problem, then it's something from your side, not on the forum side or Cloudflare's side.
…and by the way, since you wrote: "I can just visit less until your brand figures this out."…
i am not a NI employee. Forum moderators, for the most part, are not NI employees, they are users like you, who helping voluntarily… 🙏0 -
The speed benefits (DNS resolution) are extremely minimal and do not justify the REST of Cloudflare. Faster DNS resolution is also dependent on other network traffic patterns, local conditions, etc.
This("fast DNS") does not alleviate the poor technology philosophy that this represents: Cloudflare and entities like Cloudflare are a response to corporations and businesses off-loading their IT infrastructure, going into what people call "the cloud", reducing IT staffing levels and choosing contractors more and more, and basically having no real way of securing their own infrastructure without a list of 3rd party vendors to do it for them. Cloudflare is an answer to the same sort of problem McDonalds was the answer to 70 years ago — "we dont want to cook at home or clean up the mess, so let someone else do it all" (and then we turned into an obese, sick society in the west)The only ostensible way to defend this decision (firing your experienced IT staff, leaving your security to 3rd parties) is to try to rapidly generate commensurate profits for the investors, who will say "yes, we like it" until it starts to generate bad publicity or higher risk than they wish to tolerate. There is no real way to defend these decisions in front of customers or tech workers, which I am both.
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And no, I am not "helping voluntarily", just like you. This is a customer service forum, and I am asking for support from Native Instruments staff for an issue that makes my experience here worse, regardless if they have a new forum and redefined "community service" philosophy that ignores customers unless they make tickets, hoping unpaid mods do all the heavy lifting. Im not here for the new philosophy, but thank you for taking the time.
Edit: I cleared cookies and local data from ffox and loaded the website again. This time it took less than 10 minutes and did not loop endlessly, but it took about 60 sec/1 minute.
Frankly, if protecting NI dotcom from "DoS attacks" must necessarily reduce page loading speeds, 1) what about those "fast" cloudflare DNS servers?? lmao 2) there are 1000s of other music community brand pages that I visit every month, and so far ZERO of them make me wait 10-60 seconds for a cloudlfare check. This is the only one. None of those other pages have every gone down because of DoS attacks in all the years Ive patronized them. Maybe Im just lucky?
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First of all, this forum is a community, not a "customer service forum" (though obviously can work as that too). Customer service support is here.
Every forum is, first and most, a community, by definition: .Second, i have already provide you a solution for your problem. Keep the same IP address and do not logout if there is no reason to do so. As long as the system "sees" the same per user "values" it never performs a Cloudflare check, thus the page loads instantly. …its pretty simple. :-)
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This is going nowhere— I dont care if the NI CEO, themselves, claims this is no longer a customer service forum. This is a customer service forum experiencing poor management, where the "customer service" itself was seen as too expensive (hey, everyone is doing it, so we may as well! YOLO!), so the forum was re-framed as a "community" forum, like so many others.
I get it — now intrepid USERS get to come in and "answer questions" for the brand, just like Google and other tech companies tried to turn a billion people into unpaid product and service reviewers for their profitable mapping and destination social media/app products. Im not here to answer questions in this environment - this isnt how a community forum works. If you have nothing else helpful to say about the Cloudflare issue, please lets not. I was, indeed, aiming this at NATIVE INSTRUMENTS STAFF, not unpaid mods.
You've provided me a solution? lmao "dont change my IP or clear my cache" is NOT a solution, and its hilariously tone-deaf and incompetent. If this is NI's official answer, I would like to hear that from a NI employee, thanks.
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we can agree in one thing… as you said "This is going nowhere"…
and about the answer i gave, since you claimed your self as a "tech guy" you should knew that it is that simple… i am not a pro but neither some amateur, i am building websites and deal with networks for almost 23 years but this has nothing to do with the answer… you do not need to be a tech to understand this, it is just experience and common sense… it is the way internet works these days…
good luck anyway….0 -
I don't experience much of a delay when getting into the forum, but I can't use the back button because it goes back to the cloud flare check with a "this form cannot be posted again error". Makes browsing really annoying. Using Chrome on mobile.
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Hmm, I never log out, I still get the cloud fare message but only takes about 2 - 5 seconds before I’m forwarded.
My internal ip address never changes, what my isp does, who knows.
What I do know is this is the ONLY website I use that does this
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