Ask HN: Has anyone else been having issues with Cloudflare captchas this week?

3 points by Mateon1 1 year ago | 4 comments

I seem to be getting blocked over 95% of the time on my laptop (10yr old 4-core gaming laptop), on all browsers, including Chrome and Firefox.

It seems that Cloudflare increased some kind of proof of work level in their captchas around the start of this week, since every time one shows up it drains all of my CPU for 20 seconds before giving up and looping, or occasionally, after 10 minutes of refreshing and redoing the captcha, letting me through.

It doesn't even have the decency to ask for an interactive challenge after clicking the checkbox, it just wastes CPU cycles... I'm sure the real bots love that.

reify 1 year ago |

I personally do not visit any site with a captcha.

I dont play silly games.

However, in the past I have noticed that some addons prevent the completion and create a continual loop.

disable each addon if you use them one at a time to see if that makes a difference.

you dont say which OS you are using.

If you are not tech minded install bleachbit and run that to clear out all the hidden rubbish in .cache etc.

Mateon1 1 year ago | |

I'm using Windows on this laptop, this seems to affect all sites with any sort of Cloudflare protection, including Cloudflare's support and discourse sites, pubs.acs.org, and annoyingly some sites necessary for my current projects, that I need to access daily.

To clarify, this is the "Verifying your connection is secure" captcha before the site is even displayed, not a reCAPTCHA after the site is loaded.

I've tried clean browser profiles with no difference, on my normal profile I just use uBlock, Tree Style Tabs (FF)/Tabs Outliner (Chrome), and Tampermonkey for some sites (but not the ones affected by the captcha loop, in this case).

politelemon 1 year ago |

I haven't noticed anything, are there any specific sites you see it more frequently on, or just in general?

Mateon1 1 year ago | |

Seems to affect all sites, even cloudflare's own sites like http://community.cloudflare.com/ and https://support.cloudflare.com/, so I can't even report this directly to them without entering the captcha loop.