CloudFlare

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Gotcha. I just assumed from the name that it was some sort of a cloud service, and that the site itself was stored and/or hosted from it.

These are pretty pictures, but they were designed by the marketing department. Slow pipes? Fast pipes? CloudFlare's Globally Distributed Network? These words are meaningless. But, as CornFlake says, WrongPlanet costs money, and I have no real problem with the CloudFlare deal. Just be honest about it.

Umm they are being honest, using conventional terminology - but, CloudFlare is providing a service for use with networked computers so inevitably, some technical descriptions will arise and a certain level of understanding has to be assumed.
I don't think they would have got very far using modelling clay or glove-puppets.

Maybe the link I provided to the overview will help?
It fleshes out those images somewhat but introduces other technical terms which you might also not be familiar with.

If you know the concept of regional mirror download sites, a web site caching system is almost like a continuously dynamically updated web server mirror. And, the technology is tricky and quite advanced. It has many of the issues associated with a distributed database system. If the system does load balancing, your session might actually get passed from server to server during one sitting, which might explain some of the minor issues. In any case, I don't see it as a problem. The five second you wait up front is probably more than compensated for during your session.

Yes, probably.



Broken images actually have nothing to do with Cloudflare, it appears that something actually broke the images on the source server. I'll see if I can figure out what's going on.



Um, no. In fact it's the opposite, Alex pays CloudFlare for their service.



Cloudflare doesn't protect *you*. It protects the WP infrastructure, and my network.



Ok, let me clear things up for you. Cloudflare is a globally distributed varnish cache designed to minimize the routing cost between client and server. Additionally, they provide a fully stateful web application firewall and HTTP request/response compression and HTTP pipelining across multiple user sessions.

OK, then it's worth the inconvenience of having it pop up on every attempt to access the main page. Considering that some very popular sites simply crash and are inaccessible when DDoS'ed, that browser check is nice to have, I'd think.

Everybody, make SURE to have a software firewall on your PC so that a drive-by download doesn't rope it into botnet service for some loser's DDoS attempt. For USAians, Zone Alarm is excellent, and I recommended it to customers when I was a computer tech. (Disclaimer: I am a happy customer, nothing more, of Zone Alarm.) It manages to turn away most drive-by downloads.

We may be talking about different images here. A specific example is the "new, hot posts" icon: http://cdn.wrongplanet.net/modules/Foru ... ew_hot.gif When I right-click on that image in the forum listing and select "Open image in new tab" I get the CloudFlare "Checking your browser" page, then after 5 seconds the image is shown. Now that it's cached in my browser it appears OK in the forum listing, but I'd have to do that for every broken image.

+1 - No webmaster gets paid for using Cloudflare as a service. I don't either.

I'm still getting those broken images all the time. In some cases it even takes multiple "attempts" to load. Eg. when I opened http://cdn.wrongplanet.net/modules/Foru ... _reply.gif in a separate tab I got the "Checking your browser" page, which refreshed several times before actually showing the image.

Right now I have no broken icons at all, after spending some time looking around - but that may change later.
Yesterday, icons were mostly broken but not consistently.

I always get the "Checking your browser" screen on my first access of the day and if I'm away from the PC for some time, I usually get it once more on my return. I'll try to get a better idea of "away", but I'd guess it's something like 30-plus minutes of leaving all WP-related tabs untouched.

Having now had today's initial CloudFlare screen and having not yet been away from my PC, accessing the URL you gave above just results in an immediate display of the icon it links.

I get the "checking your browser" page every time I hit anything here on my iPod. It didn't let me post any replies. Hopefully this will go through.

That happened to me yesterday. It was very annoying because it was a long post I thought it might be my old version of Windows XP showing its age, but everything seems OK now, so it can't have been that. Was it Cloudflare that messed it up?

I'm with all of the others that are having problems with this.

Honestly, this Cloudflare thing should be A: replaced with absolutely anything else, and B: banished to the void. It's TERRIBLE.

"Checking my browser" once in awhile is fine.... sort of. Well, okay, no it isnt. But "checking my browser" 3 times in 10 minutes (AKA, the same damn browser I was using the last 80 times it checked, often multiple times within one session) reeks of someone not knowing what they're doing. The thing gets downright idiotic at times. Even dumber, it doesnt always do this, but seems to just choose at random. This is WITHOUT even the slightest change on my end. And no, I'm not using some screwball browser. I use Chrome and Firefox for web-browsing, but only Chrome for this specific site, and I have no addons or plugins on that. Dont like addons and plugins. This all being under Windows 7, too. No special firewalls or anything unusual either.

Worse? It really DOES screw with the site. I've lost PMs that I had been typing up because of that idiocy (had it happen just now, AGAIN). I've gotten in the habit now of ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS copying the entirety of EVERYTHING I ever type up on this site before pushing either "preview" or "submit" (as Cloudcrap can eat the message via EITHER button). Or other times, when the stupid thing goes off, the site will then pop up after it's done "checking" *cough* except that it'll be distorted. Hint: This ONLY happens when Cloudflare fires off. Not once has it happened without it, particularly since my connection is extremely stable, and again, the very common and normal, unaltered browser.

Really, other sites and forums (and I go to ALOT of both), both ones that are much smaller than this and ones that are much bigger than this can get along just fine without this sort of thing, or if it proves to be necessary can find other means that A: arent so screwy, and B: arent hyper-annoying, and are probably alot better off. What this stupid thing is likely to ACTUALLY do is push people away from the site, either because they find it hyper annoying, or because it gives the impression that something is wrong with the site.

So far, it dramatically increases the time necessary to do things on the forums here, by it's repeated message-eating and general screwups. And reading though this topic, as well as hearing from others I know on here, it seems EXTREMELY random as to who will get repeatedly bashed by it and who wont.


Argh. Sorry, had to vent.


Of course the REAL problem is the worthless, useless, pathetic jerkbag snotwad hackers (or sometimes just "hackers", specifically written in quotes like that) who pull this crap in the first place. I loathe few things as much as I loathe hackers. ALL of them.

Well, technically, yes - Cloudflare is a DNS hosting tool - That's all, other than a protection mechanism

I thought the increase resulted from my weak mobile signal. I even see that wheel icon in the ad frames sometimes.

No.