Post-Cloudflare update

It’s been nearly a week since I removed Cloudflare from my sites. As a quick followup, I did get a slight surge in traffic that lasted for a day or so after a bunch of bots' DNS caches expired, but they seem to have all given up after the Cloudflare “managed challenge” interstitial turned into an HTTP 401 error for them.

20260222-cpu.png20260222-requests.png

So, Cloudflare wasn’t even really doing anything for me anyway, and certainly wasn’t worth the problems it caused (such as being subject to its many outages and having my site become yet another source of privacy-destroying analytics and so on).

In other news, the crawlers mostly seem to have gotten wise to my tarpit and now it’s only averaging around 20 requests per second, down from a peak of 310. Oh well.

20260222-tarpit.png

At some point I think I’ll replace the forced login thing with a simpler sentience check since the login thing feels a bit aggressive, although I’m not sure I can easily fit that into Publ without modifying Publ itself due to vagaries of how Flask routing works. It’d probably be nice to just make antibot measures part of Publ anyway, though. Or maybe I can abuse error 429 for this, which would probably be a better choice than error 401 anyway.

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