Tell HN: Cloudflare's broken abuse report system, lack of staff to review issues

3 points by rtsam 123 days ago | 2 comments

Had my site taken down for phishing due to most likely a malicious report or an automated scan miscategorizing content

The site is a single page informational website (a big ad) with only one external affiliate link. There is no phishing involved. The domain name explains the purpose of the site and would not cause any confusion. The brands own marketing team provided the marketing material to use since I am an affiliate/partner of theirs. Even screenshotted the email from the brand and sent it to cloudflare. We have got no response from them.

Cloudflare has been fighting Italy's censorship, yet their own systems are censoring and policing its own clients with no way to promptly resolve.

I am all for catching malicious sites. But this wasn't even close. If Cloudfare can't respond to what is being flagged promptly, they should stop policing or allowing reports except for the most critical of reasons.

Funny enough I had just recommended Cloudflare and just started moving my workplaces enterprise domains over. However, this does not give me confidence in that decision anymore.

Wondering if others have had issues or idea's to get it resolved

bigfatkitten 123 days ago |

You've found yourself in a very unusual position.

My experience with Cloudflare has been in getting them to take down actual phishing pages and child sexual abuse material, with no luck at all.

rtsam 123 days ago | |

This situation has had me talking to others, what I have found was:

1. Hate groups and very sketchy sites are welcome to use CF.

2. One report resulted in a legit site being taken down and the phishing site being left up. (maybe report had fields reversed) And the person has being trying for over a month to get resolved.

3. One person had someone steal their trademark and copy their site. They own the trademark and CF won't do anything with the reports.

4. One person had "some adult content" warning and that resulted in being misclassified as pornography and could not get it removed. (if that is all it takes why isn't reddit or amazon classified the same)

5. Then myself and a few others that have been flagged for bogus reasons. And can't get it reviewed.

These were all issues being talked about this week. So CF seems to be all over the place. The consistent part is that you can't get any support to resolve anything.