Cloudflare protection?

[absoblogginlutely]

Has cloudflare protection been recently enabled for the donation coder site and any chance that file downloads could be excluded from the protection (although I get that might be an unwanted feature as file downloads are probably the biggest bandwidth usage.)
I look after the screenshotcaptor chocolatey package and it is now failing as the human/bot checking fails when downloading the installer with PowerShell and so the install package is broken.
Wondering whether cloudflare caching could be enabled instead which would cache the content on their servers which means you wouldn't be hosting much of the downloads and would have the advantage of localised downloads from cloudflare's cdn instead?

[Zero3K]

Yes, Cloudflare's DDOS protection was recently enabled.

[mouser]

i apologize for the frustrations.
caching for downloads seem like a good idea let me see if i can figure out how to do that.

[absoblogginlutely]

Hi mouser - any update on this?  I got a follow up email from Chocolatey that they are unable to download and install. I see it is still failing, presumably from the protection.
The full install log from their end is in their gist at https://gist.github....2520315a2ffb6a74506e
In their particular testing case, they have a standard user agent so you should be able to exclude chocolatey command line (see  line 466 , 'chocolatey command line')  which would allow them to download and test the install process however that would not help with downloading with chocolatey itself which uses PowerShell as the user agent.
Please let me know if you need any more assistance on this one - happy to help.

[Ath]

they have a standard user agent so you should be able to exclude chocolatey command line

-absoblogginlutely (September 27, 2025, 07:12 AM)

Hm, that's like locking the door, but leaving the key in the lock, on the outside

[absoblogginlutely]

I get your point, but if you cache the content on Cloudflare that is already protecting the site, then the downloads are not going to be hitting the main site in the first place which is like putting a gate at the front of the driveway with a lockbox for Amazon to leave their deliveries :-)
Something like a cache rule like
http.request.uri.path matches regex "^/Software/.+/downloads/.+"
I think that would work for Mousers software at least.

[Deozaan]

I don't have an opinion on the file downloads, but what about switching to Anubis for the website in general? Cloudflare seems heavy handed and very inconvenient for legitimate users.

Cloudflare always makes me wait a few seconds and then makes me click the little checkbox, wait a few more seconds, then finally loads the page. And it seems like 10 minutes later it challenges me again. And it doesn't seem to help much with the spammers.

In contrast, Anubis makes your computer perform "proof of work" which takes a couple seconds and then it automatically loads the page when it's finished. No user interaction is required.

More details at the above linked GitHub page, or the main site:
https://anubis.techaro.lol/

[absoblogginlutely]

any update on this? Chocolatey are bugging me about the software failing their automating testing routines as it can't be downloaded.