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Cloudflare breaks typing tag names (results in HTTP 403, ultimately preventing posting questions) when accessing Codidact over Tor
Someone at Cloudflare doesn't particularly like Tor. And because Codidact is apparently hosted behind Cloudflare, that means that by extension, Codidact is at least moderately anti-Tor in practice, if not in intention.
I've had occasional issues with things like loading more comments where, instead of the expected behavior, I get a message "we are checking your browser" where the additional comments would normally appear. Usually, force-reloading the page and trying again resolves this, sometimes after a few attempts; that's an annoyance, but at least not more than that.
Just now, I wanted to post a question to Software Development, and when I typed an appropriate tag name into the Tags field, the response I got was "The results could not be loaded.". Looking at the actual network request using Firefox's developer tools Network tab, I see that the response is a HTTP 403 with, again, that dreaded "we're checking your browser" page. Since for some reason whatever "check" this is doing doesn't finish, and tags are required, and I can't even add a tag without using the dropdown which can't load, that completely breaks posting a question. (The only reason I can even post this is because I can click to select among the required tags here on Meta, which is sufficient to allow the question to be posted.)
Please strongly consider adjusting settings as appropriate on Cloudflare so as to not effectively lock people who want to use Tor out of Codidact.
1 answer
So this isn't specific to Tor. Cloudflare scans all incoming requests and analyses their risk; if they suspect the request could be suspicious then they'll issue a challenge page, like the one you're seeing. It may be that Cloudflare considers requests from the Tor network more suspicious by default, but that's not something we have any control over.
I'll have a look to see if there's any way we can change the characteristics of the tag request to make that specifically work, but I can't guarantee we'll find a solution.
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