4 ms·
We do know, just ask anyone who runs a more popular site or does anything where abuse can be monetized (shopping, reviews, etc.). Avoiding that due to obscurity
by acdha 5mo ago
We do know, just ask anyone who runs a more popular site or does anything where abuse can be monetized (shopping, reviews, etc.). Avoiding that due to obscurity isn’t an answer because it’s saying you’re safe until something, possibly outside of your control, causes the bots to descend and give you an extra 500M requests with no chance of revenue.
I’m with OP: I don’t like this but the alternatives all look like the death of the open web.
- handoflixue 5mo ago> just ask anyone who runs a more popular site The person you're responding to already said they ran a modestly sized site. What actual scale opens one up to abuse? If only the top 1% of sites need it, then it seems silly to say "everyone" needs it.
- daishi55 5mo agoSo everyone is paying cloudflare… why?
- fragmede 5mo agoMost likely not. Their free tier is fairly generous.
- tardedmeme 5mo agoBecause paying with MITM is far less visible than paying with money
- LgWoodenBadger 5mo agoBecause charging for bandwidth/traffic is still a thing, unfortunately
- ceejayoz 5mo agoIt’s not just scale. Do you accept user generated content? If so, more of a target.
- wizzwizz4 5mo agoStack Overflow was outside of the Cloudflare network for years, and anti-abuse was maybe 3 or 4 full-time jobs – much of which still needs to be done, because Cloudflare's anti-bot protection hasn't actually stopped it. Most UGC sites are not as big as Stack Overflow was at its peak.
- black_puppydog 5mo agoerrr... so anything related to UGC now has a lower bound of 3-4 FTE? Sure, I'll hire a team of content moderators next time I think about putting a comment form under my blog...
- Dylan16807 5mo agoPlease read their last sentence again and think about how much it understates the difference between stack overflow in its prime and a normal website. Also the "much of which still needs to be done".
- GoblinSlayer 5mo agoYes? Cloudflare doesn't replace moderators. At all. It only allegedly filters bot generated content, it doesn't filter user generated content and doesn't even intend to.
- ceejayoz 5mo agoMost UGC sites also don't have a horde of volunteer mods voting to close/delete things.
- wizzwizz4 5mo agoI'm referring specifically to the activities of Charcoal (https://charcoal-se.org/ https://charcoal-se.org/) and their Stack Exchange staff counterparts, taken together. This is about large-scale platform abuse, of the sort that Cloudflare is alleged to prevent (but doesn't, really), not the more mundane (and laborious) task of manual quality control.