What is Cloudflare ? How does it help webmasters ?

0xym0r0n said:
Yeah I have an uncanny need to have a few images continually updated for my users. So I have to read the manual a bit more. I think I'm allowed an exempt folder or 3 rules... something like that, under the free edition.
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Correct. Free domains do have 3 page rules available to exclude things from certain features or caching. What kind of site do you run?
 
whyweprotest said:
Cloudflare has been invaluable to us, those complaining about page load times ought look at their performance settings and page rules. Yes some functionality significantly decreases performance, but most enhance it.

Cloudflare literally either saved me thousands of dollars or hours / days of downtime. Used to attract ddos once or twice a week, was paying hundreds in mitigation service to no avail. After switching to cloudflare, which is not advertised as mitigation service resolved all those issues, downtime since has been minimal.

So thank you damon, matthew and everyone involved. I can't fathom the $40 a month going your way somehow recoups the costs you might incur for having us.
I owe you a cake.
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We always accept cake:)

Where are most of your attacks coming from? We do offer DDoS mitigation through I'm Under Attack....but might be worth seeing where the attack traffic is coming from and challenging visitors from those areas.
 
"This thread gets no posts for weeks or months, and that's when you turn up and bump it with yet another "service update" to push it back to the top again"

That's easy to explain. Not everything that we post on our blog (or anywhere else) probably doesn't apply to everyone here. I have also really looked at what I'm doing with updates and the like, so I really try to focus on issues that might apply to a number of issues and I do not post every marketing message we actually put out there. If you take datacenter updates, for example, these do directly apply to folks that are using the service because it impacts the speed in which people can access site owner's sites and overall website performance (many customers in AU and NZ did complain about some latency using CloudFlare...so this does directly tie into their experience overall).. I also like to make sure I'm posting things about how people can avoid service issues with CloudFlare as well. You will notice a common theme of issues with Rocket Loader in many of the threads, so I like to make sure people know how to turn this feature on or off in a matter of seconds.

No offense, but you seem to be ignoring my earlier comments about what I actually could be doing if I wanted to be really "spammy". I've also helped a lot of people here with direct messages to me about the service or other by being available in some way. It is also not that hard to ignore any post you're not interested in, IMHO.
 
damoncloudflare said:
"
The other issues entirely sound related to Rocket Loader. Have you tried turning this off?
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I have found that certain Xenforo pages / treads were loading slowly or hanging when enabling image optimization and lazy loading. I disabled those features and pages are back to loading quickly.
damoncloudflare said:
We always accept cake:)

Where are most of your attacks coming from? We do offer DDoS mitigation through I'm Under Attack....but might be worth seeing where the attack traffic is coming from and challenging visitors from those areas.
Click to expand...
Back in the day most attacks received were done with RFI nets, I believe cloudflare has been a real deterrent since the site hasn't gone down due to ddos since we made the switch. As for origin, difficult to tell, especially now in the absence of noticeable attacks.
 
Well, a lot of that stuff comes out of places like China. If you don't want traffic from that region, or don't need it, you can always block them in Threat Control (challenges visitors from that regions with a captcha, which is good for stopping most bots) or directly on your server.

Not all traffic is entirely good traffic:(
 
FaithFirst said:
I have converted to Cloud Flare. :(
It really does work well for Html sites (had issues with community sites).
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What kind of issues with community sites? The number one thing we run into is issues will happen if you don't have something to restore visitor IP (our ips show without the mod, so it can most certainly cause login issues for folks).
 
So I contacted Cloudflare and someone in support told me X would work. Assured me that it would too.

Do you want to know what?


@@@@@@ !!!! $$$$$$$ !!!!!!!! &&&&&&& !!!!!!!!!!!! ^^^^^^^^^ !!!!!!!!! :mad::mad::mad:

(This post has been censored beyond belief. It servers no other purpose than to make me feel better)
 
It was great for a bit! I use it on my ecommerce site now, but as far as my forum went... I gave up. I was just hoping to have it work out of the box with little reading and adjusting.

I wanted images in a certain file to update immediately everytime they were uploaded... SO I made that work after some reading and digging.

Random users would login and have the IP address with cloudflare... not their real IP. This sparked an issue when an annoying member signed up and was only logged with a Cloudflare IP instead of his real ip.

For some odd reason certain images that were remotely hosted on other sites like gifsoup or break were NOT showing or loading in threads/replies. IDK if they were somehow filtered out but this issue existed past a day and a manual purge.

Next issue was around 9-11am my time the navbar images would stop loading...

I decided to give up. Despite the increase in performance, the enticing idea of 100% uptime, and more security... I DON'T feel like learning the ins and outs enough to get my website through this.

Ecommerce (X-Cart) has shown a major benefit from it :) I've actually had tons of issues with X-Cart because there always seems to be TONS of exploits... or maybe people just really don't like me... IDK. Anyways... Cloudflare has put a nice big wall between me and the meanies who pick on my ecommerce site.
 
Adam Howard said:
So I contacted Cloudflare and someone in support told me X would work. Assured me that it would too.

Do you want to know what?


@@@@@@ !!!! $$$$$$$ !!!!!!!! &&&&&&& !!!!!!!!!!!! ^^^^^^^^^ !!!!!!!!! :mad::mad::mad:

(This post has been censored beyond belief. It servers no other purpose than to make me feel better)
Click to expand...


What is "x" would work?
 
0xym0r0n said:
It was great for a bit! I use it on my ecommerce site now, but as far as my forum went... I gave up. I was just hoping to have it work out of the box with little reading and adjusting.

I wanted images in a certain file to update immediately everytime they were uploaded... SO I made that work after some reading and digging.

(Only need to do this if you're changing static content. Development Mode bypasses our cache while you place changes to static content on the site. You can, however, also purge the cache or single file as additional options).

Random users would login and have the IP address with cloudflare... not their real IP. This sparked an issue when an annoying member signed up and was only logged with a Cloudflare IP instead of his real ip.

(You have to have some sort of mod to restore original visitor IP).

For some odd reason certain images that were remotely hosted on other sites like gifsoup or break were NOT showing or loading. IDK if they were somehow filtered out but this issue existed past a day and a manual purge.

(This sounds like an issue with Rocket Loader & this feature is easy to turn off)

Next issue was around 9-11am my time the navbar images would stop loading...
(This also sounds like an issue with Rocket Loader)

I decided to give up. Despite the increase in performance, the enticing idea of 100% uptime, and more security... I DON'T feel like learning the ins and outs enough to get my website through this.

Agree that it can be tricky (and frustrating) for new users coming aboard. There is definitely a learning curve of sorts for some issues.
Click to expand...
 
Yeah there is a curve. I was thinking as a minor suggestion that you should have 'presets' added to it. For people like me who are just to dopey or lazy to figure it out.

Forum preset
Ecommerce preset
Fan page
Blog
Wiki
CMS
Info page preset

etc etc etc...

I mean every site is not the same but a lot of them have a lot of the same 'core' features.
 
Not a bad idea re: preset. I think what I am going to do, tho, is right another tutorial for each type of setup that people should see when they are going through the signup process & things to look for. The concerns are a little bit different for some of them, but some of the concerns are actually somewhat universal (original visitor IP, for example).
 
damoncloudflare said:
Not a bad idea re: preset. I think what I am going to do, tho, is right another tutorial for each type of setup that people should see when they are going through the signup process & things to look for. The concerns are a little bit different for some of them, but some of the concerns are actually somewhat universal (original visitor IP, for example).
Click to expand...
That'd work for tutorial watchers XD I'd watch a tutorial! Can't say the same for anyone else. Just wasn't into the searching and digging as I don't know what to search for when I hardly know the issue other than 'image won't load.' or 'cloudflare IP' lol.
 
For Cloudflare, the best way to get the original/correct visitor IP address, if you don't mind a file edit, add this to the bottom of your [forumroot]/lib/config.php file

Code: 
// Cloudflare visitor IP
if (isset($_SERVER['HTTP_CF_CONNECTING_IP'])) { $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] = $_SERVER['HTTP_CF_CONNECTING_IP']; }
This will still work whether you have CloudFlare enabled or not.
 

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