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

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.

posted about 3 years ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

3y ago

Canina‭

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