Ask HN: Is Cloudflair Reasonable?
2 coderatlarge 1 5/14/2025, 3:51:04 PM
as someone who has to live behind a great firewall, I find myself using Expressvpn and other VPN products by necessity - as a result I end up staring at cloudflair pages much more often than I would expect. i can’t help but feel that cloudflair is making vpn users’ lives miserable for their own gain. is there any evidence either way?
To answer your question I suppose they are as reasonable as they can get considering many sites can use CF free accounts and people can choose whether or not to enable the anti-bot capabilities. The alternative would be for more sites to build their own anti-bot measures but that can get expensive very fast. I do not see how they would gain by blocking VPN users unless one could pay to get around the anti-bot measures which would defeat the purpose of blocking bots in the first place as some botters would pay-to-play using stolen credit cards.
Another alternative would be for sites to find a way to create a group of "trusted users" and provide said users a way to bypass CF. i.e. each site having their own paid VPN gateway or the trusted users put up a paid bond to access a dynamically scaled HAProxy Anycast mesh. However by paying using a traceable source that defeats the purpose of a VPN and so I return to the phrase, "And this is why we can not have nice things". Short of finding all the miscreants and dropping them into an ancient style Roman Colosseum Pay-Per-View Gladiator Tournament with no rules this problem will likely always exist.