[Users] [Bug 4170] Problem accessing RSS feeds for sites using Cloudflare with TOR proxy

[noreply at thewildbeast.co.uk]

https://www.thewildbeast.co.uk/claws-mail/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=4170

--- Comment #1 from Andrej Kacian <andrej at kacian.sk> ---
First of all, Cloudflare's captcha protection is something optional that site
owners can enable for their site. So this is not really about Cloudflare, this
is about individual website owners preventing users from accessing their site's
feed. Furthermore, it is not an all-or-nothing situation - it is possible to
only enable it selectively[1].

So, if a site's feed is "protected" by this captcha, from purely technical
point of view it simply means that the site is publishing a feed URL that is
broken for some visitors.

If we take a step back, it means that the site owner does not want robots
accessing an URL that is primarily and implicitly meant to be accessed by
robots. The site owner only wants live people, using full web browsers
accessing it. What you should do is to respect their wish, and simply not
consume their feed (or to look at it via your browser only).

Now, I suspect that many individual site owners do not even realize this
distinction (a resource intended for live humans vs. a resource intended for
robots), and that they could be persuaded to modify settings for their site
accordingly.

The Tor Browser probably bypasses this by a not-yet-standardized protocol,
using a plugin mentioned here[2], but it is just a hacky workaround, and not a
real solution to people misconfiguring their website.

1.
https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200170096-How-do-I-turn-off-the-Cloudflare-Captcha-challenge-page-
2. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/10/05/cloudflare_tor/

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