Broken federation due to CloudFlare?

7 months ago by NodeBB to c/meta

Broken federation due to CloudFlare?

It looks like right now NodeBB instances are unable to query anything from aussie.zone because of the CloudFlare bot protection.

Could this be adjusted to allow ActivityPub-style requests through?

@meta

freamon 1 point 7 months ago

Just come across this myself.

Long-running fediverse instances will likely have old copies of established aussie.zone actors, but federation will be broke for newer instances and/or newer actors.

Verifiable by doing something like:

WORKS:   
curl --header 'accept: application/activity+json' https://reddthat.com/u/lodion

DOESN'T WORK:   
curl --header 'accept: application/activity+json' https://aussie.zone/u/lodion

I chose reddthat.com because it seems like it has similar protection, but allows for AP requests. (other instances use non-CF solutions, but I imagine they've had to make similar tweaks).

It's been a couple of days, so it might be worth some pings:

@admin@aussie.zone

@lodion@aussie.zone

save

path: 0 22523525, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 1

lodion 1 point 7 months ago

Thanks for the ping. Without getting into details, this is a security measure to block AI bots that were scraping aussie.zone and effectively DDoSing us.

If there are specific apps/platforms that are incorrectly being caught in this, I can allow them on a case by case basis.

save

path: 0 22523525 22524539, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 0

lodion 1 point 7 months ago

I've made a change to security policy, but am not across any instances running NodeBB with which to test.

save

path: 0 22524590, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 1

nodebb 1 point 7 months ago

@lodion The instance I noticed this on was activitypub.space. It is still not able to access content from aussie.zone.

It sets NodeBB/\<version\> (url) in its user agent.

save

path: 0 22524590 22563384, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 0