Cloudflare protected sites loop "Checking if the site connection is secure" on Firefox 52 and Mypal 68

[EliraFriesnan]

I remember, back in 2015, there was a virus that asked to prove whether you're "not" a robot, when someone tried to delete it. The same what Cloudflare does.

Conclusion: Cloudflare is a virus. Don't visit.

Trying to parrot @D.Draker's conclusions. I know, it's nowhere near the original, but I try.

[Karla Sleutel]

2 hours ago, EliraFriesnan said:

Trying to parrot @D.Draker's conclusions. I know, it's nowhere near the original, but I try.

Conclusion: Cloudflare is a virus. Don't visit.

Good! Why not?!? Of couse it feels you're still a newbie, but good!

Avast Blog:

"FakeCaptcha scams—When the "I'm not a robot" button is a trap.."

https://blog.avast.com/fakecaptcha-scams

How do we know whether Cloudflare is not a scam itself?

[NotHereToPlayGames]

Anyone stupid enough to follow the "verification steps" of that fake captcha DESERVES to have his/her hard drive reformatted !!!

Certainly NOBODY here at MSFN is that stupid.

My parents, on the other hand, they have fallen for fake "download now" buttons on more than one occasion.

[Tripredacus]

Cloudflare is legit and MANY websites are forced to use it to deal with the huge issue of bots these days. The alternative is to dig through access logs and maintain a block list manually.

[Karla Sleutel]

On 1/30/2026 at 7:15 AM, Tripredacus said:

Cloudflare is legit and MANY websites are forced to use it to deal with the huge issue of bots these days.

Do we need to assume bots use the default browser flags positions?

[Karla Sleutel]

On 1/27/2026 at 7:16 PM, NotHereToPlayGames said:

Anyone stupid enough to follow the "verification steps" of that fake captcha DESERVES to have his/her hard drive reformatted !!!

Certainly NOBODY here at MSFN is that stupid.

Our supervisor says Cloudflare isn't fake.

Read a lot of posts where MSFN members do solve Cloudflare ans other verification captchas.

I immediately close such websites.

[Tripredacus]

On 2/1/2026 at 8:26 AM, Karla Sleutel said:

Do we need to assume bots use the default browser flags positions?

No, this makes things difficult for a server admin. Another site I admin on can often see bot swarms at levels that exhaust server resources (database specifically) and will make the site slow. So I've had to pull the access.log a couple of times and run it through an analyzer tool to find out just how these bots appear. The "good" ones, bots operated by legitimate (although some people may disagree) corporations, have user agents or other identifying information that they send along with their HTTP GET requests. These are bots like search engine spiders and AIs. The Western world bots from Microsoft, Amazon, XAI, etc are all identifyable and more importantly do not tend to bombard sites likely because a lot of information is already cached in datacenters. The corporate bots from SEA have user agents but tend to send way too many requests. The issue is tied between the SEA AI bots and the "unknown" variety that can be determined to be from an AI or LLM setup *somewhere* but they send no information along to the web server. So when 6,000 bots decide to hit the server at some point, 5% are legit western origin, 45% are legit eastern origin and the rest are the unidentified.

Of course, many of the unidentified are not actual mysteries, but you can't determine that just from the logs. You'd have to research IP addresses, ports, GET strings, etc and it can be figured out. But this takes an incredible amount of time to not only research, keep up to date and set block/control lists on the server that using a go-between that already has most of this information tracked is very compelling. Especially since Cloudflare has a free option that many sites can use, this is likely why you end up seeing it used so much. 

All Cloudflare is, basically a software firewall that sits between a website and the user. 

On 2/1/2026 at 8:32 AM, Karla Sleutel said:

Our supervisor says Cloudflare isn't fake.

Read a lot of posts where MSFN members do solve Cloudflare ans other verification captchas.

I immediately close such websites.

Cloudflare shows different things to different browsers, browser settings (js enabled or not, etc) and based on perceived country or region of origin. There is also likely a difference between their free and paid version. 

I personally have not see any sort of captcha from Cloudflare in a long time, I only get a checkbox to prove I'm human.

[NotHereToPlayGames]

44 minutes ago, Tripredacus said:

I personally have not see any sort of captcha from Cloudflare in a long time, I only get a checkbox to prove I'm human.

Generally speaking, you should never get a Cloudflare captcha on any MODERN web browser that UPDATES ITSELF every few weeks.

The problem is for those that prefer to NOT run these auto-updates.  All it takes is a browser that is THREE OR FOUR versions "old" to TRIGGER the Cloudflare captchas.

I've never witnessed anything but a checkbox that checks itself, zero user interaction, when at work (where the IT dept forces me to reboot my laptop 25 times in any given 30 day month all in the guise of "updates" for this or that).