Mathwiz

A lot of these bots are probably using folks' smart TVs to evade blocking: https://www.feistyduck.com/newsletter/issue_138_the_threat_of_residential_proxies?utm_source=fd&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter-2026-06

And in the US, R3dfox brings back memories of a beloved comedian: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redd_Foxx

Does make me wonder though.... Does MSFN have any remaining defense against the onslaught of AI scrapers?

I was wondering why R3dFox started letting me sign in!

In the case of R3dFox, the 3 is just a backwards E: "Red Fox." But e3k-blah appears to be just a random string of characters. I don't think there's anything special about the digit 3. If there's a commonality between those two, I think they both came out of (IMO silly) "password complexity" requirements that made everyone come up with mixes of letters and numbers for their passwords. It became common to either use 0 for O, 1 for I, 2 for Z, 3 for E, 4 for A, 5 for S, 6 for G, and 7 for T; or just use a random password generator and let the browser remember it. Later these usages spread beyond passwords.

Not sure why but I'm now able to sign onto MSFN in R3dFox 142.0.1. The Cloudflare loop that stopped me before is no longer occurring. I haven't had the guts to sign out and try signing back in in Serpent yet. I guess I could try it in a clean profile....

I just use shortcuts, or type "msfn" and rely on auto-complete. So I'd forgotten that it's .org. Not a big deal, I suppose; I'm sure everyone knew I meant this forum. I have the same experience with R3dFox 142.0.1 as @VistaLover had with 140; I have to use the shortcut, which includes the /board part. Even FireFox 150 requires the /board part. This might be something @xper can fix with a redirect. Of course I know, but other readers may not, so just for clarity: Serpent 55 was abandoned by "upstream" long ago, when "upstream" was Moonchild Productions. And unlike Serpent 52, 55 doesn't use the "official" UXP engine. (UXP's upstream is still MCP.) However, luckily for us St 55 users (the few, the proud), @roytam1 has been quite successful in porting UXP changes into St 55's engine, so I still consider UXP to be "upstream" of St 55. Completely unofficially of course ;) Surely MSFN isn't the only board on the Web using Invision Community software, so the trick, I think, would be for someone to ask MCP on behalf of another board using Invision (for support in Pale Moon, of course, which almost certainly has the same "ugliness"). But even lacking a specific ask, it appears MCP has been (slowly) adding support for newer CSS "thingies" to UXP, so msfn's appearance is likely to improve with time.

I'm trying out msfn.com with the latest version of Serpent 55. Still ugly, but not quite as ugly as it was with the 5/15 version. I suspect a lot of the ugliness is new CSS thingies that Serpent and its upstream equivalent don't yet support, so I guess upstream is making progress. Maybe someday msfn will look correct in Serpent again. I still keep the 5/15 Serpent version around because it renders one site (avsforum.com) better than the latest version does. I suspect the latest version's rendering is "correct" because more modern browsers render it the same way, so what the 5/15 version does is a "feature" (a bug that I happen to find useful).

It just changed! Let's Encrypt issued a new 60-day certificate Thursday, 9/3. I forgot how often certificates get changed these days. So it's no longer possible to check the previous certificate, leaving the possibility slightly open that it was being sent by a MITM attacker. Probably not - I'm still not worried - but because of the timing, I can't prove it was safe. Oh, well; on to other things....

Regarding the recent issues with Cloud-flare, it looks like these Firefox builds are passing all Cloud-flare challenges perfectly. I haven't been hit with a "verify you are human" page, let alone a loop, yet while using Firefox 150. (It's possible that even v.115 for XP users will work, but I'm not going to try that myself.) v.150 has some annoying issues with highlighting the drop-down menu item the mouse pointer is on in Win 7, but I can live with that. Still, this is the second browser change being forced on me this year, first from Serpent to R3dFox, then to these Firefox builds, and I'm getting a little tired of having to waste my time manually migrating to yet another browser. 🙄 (The only automatic upgrade path is from Edge, which I haven't used in years.)

That's called a "man-in-the-middle" attack. Companies sometimes do that with their workers' PCs. It's also how ProxHTTPSProxy works. But it can't be pulled off unless your browser trusts the MITM's certificate authority (CA). You are implicitly accusing a browser-trusted CA of issuing a false MSFN certificate to CF, so that CF can pretend to be MSFN and carry out the attack. Any CA caught issuing false certificates, even to CF, would immediately be distrusted by both Google and Mozilla, which would pretty much put them out of business. OK, in theory I guess there could be some grand conspiracy between CF, Google, and Mozilla to steal MSFN users' passwords, but it seems pretty unlikely to me. But if you're still not convinced, we can just ask @xper to settle the matter: Which CA issued MSFN's current TLS certificate? What is the certificate's fingerprint? If his answers match the certificate your browser is seeing, then your browser is seeing MSFN's actual certificate, and you are safe. If not, then you are right and have my sincere apologies.

I don't think so. HTTPS: is end-to-end encrypted. Only MSFN's server can see what you entered for your password. Middlemen like Cloudflare can't eavesdrop. That said, Cloudflare is causing lots of issues for users of older browsers, and has been even before MSFN's latest update.

I'm lucky; I'm on Win 7 so I have access to newer browser versions. Site looks much better in R3dfox 142. But I can't sign in! As soon as I try I get stuck in a Cloudflare "verify you are human" loop. I tried the SSUAO @AstroSkipper gave above but had no luck, even with uBO completely disabled. At least with St 55 I can sign in and post. I don't totally blame MSFN for that. Cloudflare has been making life miserable for users of browsers over 2 months old for months now.

Oh, wow. When I got the email, I figured there would likely be an "extreme makeover," but this is ridiculous. Almost everything is now black on white, which I don't like but can live with. But many clickable buttons are now dark blue on black and nearly unreadable. (I found I can highlight the text to make them readable though.) The main topic pages have ballooned in size, with each topic often taking a full page now. The new site is ugly as hell, but at least it works. Well, for the most part. I've been using @roytam1 's Serpent 55 (and an older version dated 5/15). Clicking the "*" to go to the first unread post brings up Cloudflare's challenge, which St 55 cannot pass. I just have to go to the last page and try to figure out which post I read last. Trying to click the arrow in a quoted post to go to the original post is blocked too.

Well, it was a matter of the purest optimism to have posed the query in the first place.... Perhaps @roytam1 could implement the pref and use it to temporarily shut off :has() support, in the hope that an upstream fix will soon be available.