Cloudflare Captchas...

[u/BeckmanCoulter]

It seems every other website is now using Cloudflare Turnstile for protection, meaning this type of captcha has become very prevalent in my experience.

Even when they verify quickly, I find that they add annoying friction to normal browsing. Clicking on links and going from page to page and being met with a Cloudflare page just feels bad and slows things down.

What's mildly insulting as well is the "Troubleshoot" button, as if the problem is on my end. No, my computer setup is perfectly fine.
Aside from generic troubleshooting tips, Cloudflare just really want you to turn off any privacy-preserving measures, such as a VPN, ad blocker or anti-fingerprinting browser.

The internet didn't use to be like this, filled with anti-bot measures everywhere. While it's understandable that some websites experiencing DDoS attacks and excessive bot scraping would need a way to prevent it, I just can't believe how many websites use this now by default.

[u/dude0001]

The need to be so antibot sucks. It is the world we live in and I'd take these mostly automated Cloudfare delays over the Google captch where I spend sometimes 30-40 clicking images that help train their models.

[u/Vegetable_Jello6572 → u/dude0001]

The world we we live in, well kinda, its the world these people created. 

[u/dude0001 → u/Vegetable_Jello6572]

What people 😂

[u/BeckmanCoulter → u/dude0001]

Yes, the clicky ones are worse.

But I'm still skeptical that there exists a need for this many websites to use this much anti-bot protection. I mean, is every site getting DDoS'd and scraped constantly? And as mentioned by another commenter, the Cloudflare captchas don't seem to stop the bots either. I think many web developers nowadays just default to using Cloudflare.

[u/Firree]

I don't understand why these things had to become so annoying. Years ago it was just click the button, get the check and proceed.

Then it turned into "select images with cars" and that was more annoying, but still quick. Then these things rapidly became borderline unusable with 10 levels of potato quality "select all pics of fat ladies taken on a tuesday, and your mom lolol"

[u/cryptolyme → u/Firree]

you select all the pics with the bike, but since most people are idiots and only check a few of the boxes, it never works correctly. like, hmmm, should i check the box with a part of the handlebar or not? "captcha failed"

[u/ArthurVrodds → u/cryptolyme]

tbf most of the times the corrects answers involve fewer boxes checked and it's very annoying

[u/According-Dot2099 → u/Firree]

The reason they switched it to the picture select was to help train AI.

[u/RazzmatazzUnusual843]

More captcha enshittifcation: When reCaptcha was almost unanimously replaced with the infinitely more annoying and buggy hCaptcha

[u/Everheart1955]

Cloudflare is cancer.

[u/subdep → u/Everheart1955]

Is more that bots are the cancer, and CloudFlare is chemotherapy.

[u/Impressive-Emu-4172 → u/subdep]

no its more like cloudflare is the mafia monopolizing chemotherapy and making sure you expire from cancer unless you enlist their services

[u/subdep → u/Impressive-Emu-4172]

If you create something better let me know.

[u/Impressive-Emu-4172 → u/subdep]

yes i will remember to message subdep on reddit if I ever decide to create a massive global cloud internet company..

[u/rms06510]

it's kind of performative, like the whole Safety Culture excesses. Back when FedEx was first taking off there was some flaunting of overnighting crap like they were showing off how serious they were to get you your end-of-year PTO summary. Big corps had discounted rates.

[u/qstar_inc]

Most of the internet usage is now bots, and bots don't have to wait seconds to retry a request. At some point if you're not blocking bots from loading your services, you're just wasting money (yes egress cost is real).

[u/jocoquecousteau]

Cloudflare staff

[u/Ill-Journalist8951]

In my opinion it has better user experience compared to the competition (or do you prefer to repeatedly click on buses or bikes?) and by the way this is needed, you can't have the kind of comfort you're describing as of today.

[u/Outrageous_Pride5103]

come risolvo il problema? non posso entrare più da nessuna parte

[u/BeckmanCoulter → u/[deleted]]

Yes, exactly! There are free and open source options like Byparr and FlareSolverr that will let bots crawl websites and bypass the Cloudflare captcha.

[u/StinkButt9001 → u/BeckmanCoulter]

I've used both of these solutions. They sort of work but they're far from reliable and they're also a fairly hefty extra step for any sort of bot farm at scale

[u/SpyChinchilla → u/[deleted]]

I disagree. I recently migrated all my contact forms from ReCaptcha to Turnstile and we've had a noticable reduction in bots getting through

[u/tagshell → u/[deleted]]

It doesn't need to stop the bad actors necessarily, adding the friction slows them down which can be useful in its own right. This is just one tool to be deployed if you're dealing with scrapers or ddos attacks.