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Comments on Cloudflare "checking my browser" results in a 404 when forwarded to the requested page

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Cloudflare "checking my browser" results in a 404 when forwarded to the requested page

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For some reason, Cloudflare has apparently decided that my browser is untrustworthy as of late, and want to do something to "check" it before allowing me to access Codidact.

That's a snag, but wouldn't be so bad in the end were it not for the fact that when the checking (which of course requires Javascript, so breaks things for anyone who has Javascript disabled and just want to browse and read) finishes, and I am forwarded to the page I actually wanted to get to to begin with, I invariably get a 404 response instead of the page that I wanted.

The culprit appears to be the fact that, after the browser check completes, I'm redirected to the originally request page (with the addition of a __cf_chl_jschl_tk__ query parameter) as a POST request. Since most content pages (quite correctly, given that POST requests are typically used for requests that have side effects) don't support POST requests, this results in a misleading "not found" response complete with a 404 status code in the HTTP response, instead of the much more appropriate 405 "method not allowed" response or, you know, Cloudflare actually doing the redirection properly in the first place thus avoiding the situation entirely. (A request that starts out as a GET request should not blindly be converted into a POST request under the hood!)

Whatever the actual underlying problem is, though, to first receive a "we're checking your browser" page soon to be followed by a "404 Not Found" error for something like the very front page of a community doesn't exactly make a good first impression on a new visitor.

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1 comment thread

Are you, by chance, in Sweden? (because that probably would explain why you see that message so oft... (6 comments)
Are you, by chance, in Sweden? (because that probably would explain why you see that message so oft...
luap42‭ wrote over 2 years ago · edited over 2 years ago

Are you, by chance, in Sweden? (because that probably would explain why you see that message so often)

Canina‭ wrote over 2 years ago

luap42‭ I'm not sure how my geographical location would influence how qpixel responds to a request it receives? The bigger issue I'm raising here isn't the browser check (that's a nuisance, but not a problem), but the fact that I get a 404 once it completes.

luap42‭ wrote over 2 years ago

Canina‭ I'll look into why you're getting a 404 but I asked, because we had to implement a Cloudflare-level brake on requests from Sweden (aka the verification step) due to a sudden, massive increase of requests from there, very likely to be automated and malicious. So I was just wondering if that may be the cause for being shown the warning that often.

ArtOfCode‭ wrote over 2 years ago

Canina‭ I've just tuned the block slightly so that it should exclude logged-in users, so you should avoid most of these. Let me know if there's not been any change.

Canina‭ wrote over 2 years ago · edited over 2 years ago

ArtOfCode‭ I still got the "browser check" just now, but at least when it went through, I was properly redirected to a functional site front page (which, although I didn't explicitly check that, would mean a GET, not a POST, request). So whatever change you made might at least have fixed the worse part.

Canina‭ wrote over 2 years ago

ArtOfCode‭ I take that back. The same thing happened again now; going to the front page (not yet logged in), got a Cloudflare browser check which completed successfully, and resulted in a POST request to https://meta.codidact.com/?__cf_chl_jschl_tk__=... which gave me a 404 response back. If I click in the address bar and press Enter without making any change to the URL, the front page loads fine through a GET request.