Seeing a Captcha screen when you try to access AoS site?

Ace of Spades
1

I’m reposting this from one of my posts on the AoS forums, just in case anyone is wondering what the hell is STILL going on with the AoS website.

So it appears the AoS site operators have added Cloudflare security to their website to protect against computers infected with viruses which is stupid because:

  1. The first thing you’ll see is a white page that informs you your computer is infected with viruses and botnets and blah, blah, blah SCARY STUFF!!! It isn’t. Cloudflare is a piece of crap security software for websites that is well known for 99.999999% false positives and once in a blue moon maybe a 0.0000001% legit catch.

  2. If my computer was infected with a virus it wouldn’t infect the AoS website and it’s highly unlikely it would be used in a botnet attack against the AoS website. Let’s be honest, it would be pointless overkill using a botnet to take down this website. Hackers take down government websites on a routine basis. If they want to hack the AoS site, a captcha screen isn’t going to do more than give them an extra chuckle.

  3. Cloudflare is well-known for a ridiculous amount of false positives. A quick google and you’ll see many site operators have had to shut down Cloudflare completely because it completely locked users out of their website, would unlock them for a few minutes and then lock them out again.

This developer explains the problem perfectly. Not only did Cloudflare constantly block his site’s users but it blocked the site’s owners as well repeatedly.

One of the ways Cloudflare boosts the speed of your site is to block spam ip's and block people who have infected computers from visting your site. If someone hits your site and is flagged they are asked to enter a captcha to verify they are human.

The first few hours we tried Cloudflare we got alerts that our site had been hacked. People expecting GeekTyrant got a Cloudflare captcha screen; Their site says a customizable screen is coming. The problem is there were so many false positives that we had to turn Cloudflare off after only a few hours.

The largest problem is that our writers including myself could not create posts without seeing a captcha screen every few minutes.

There are countless more web developers describing the exact same problem. In other words, Cloudflare is crap. It’s not going to protect AoS from scary, imaginary botnets under your bed, it’s just gonna piss off people.

2

One more reason not to use AoS forums…besides the totalitarian reign of the site admins (except Izzy of course). ;D

3

Strangely enough, I haven’t ran into Cloudflare despite lurking there quite a bit.

4

I don’t frequent (any) forums often, though I posted there on there today. No problems for me!

5

I would like an official explanation of what is happening to the website these past 2 weeks from Izzy if possible because Stack says its “private issues with Ben and Co.” in GH forums

6

http://cdn.memegenerator.net/instances/400x/22349272.jpg

7

There was no real explanation Reki. Anyways, 0.76 is coming out instead of the rumored 0.80. I also heard 1.0 is coming out late this summer, which means its time to break the piggy banks. :stuck_out_tongue:

8

They toned down the security settings like the next day after I posted that on the AoS forums.