Russian IPs can't use Xenforo - What's the solution?

DigitalME

DigitalME

Member
The issue you are facing is known as the "16-Kilobyte Curtain." It isn't a bug or a standard technical error; it is a deliberate, state-level "traffic shaping" campaign by Russian authorities.




What happened and When?​

  • The Start: The systematic throttling began on June 9, 2025, and intensified through June 15, 2025.



  • The Cause: The Russian internet regulator, Roskomnadzor, directed major ISPs (Rostelecom, MTS, Megafon, Beeline) to target Western infrastructure.
  • The Target: Specifically Cloudflare, but also other providers like Hetzner, DigitalOcean, and OVH. The goal is to force Russian site owners to move to domestic, state-controlled hosting and to break VPN/circumvention tools that use Cloudflare’s "tunnels."






Anyone worked out a fix for this? I thought maybe pushing them to Tapatalk would be a fix, as they would go through their systems, any cloudflare stuff which is over 16kb is being blocked currently by the majority of our Russian users, they're too old to be pushed to a VPN
 
DigitalME said:
Anyone worked out a fix for this?
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ryan reynolds hd GIF
 
DigitalME said:
I read it's also blocking western hosting companies too, I see your forum is Russian, are you hosting with AWS or somewhere else?
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i think the only sustainable way is to host in local hosting providers from the gov registry (i also moved right after they started blocking cf)
and be prepared to increase your expenses significantly (like 3x-to 5x at very least)
 
findozor said:
i think the only sustainable way is to host in local hosting providers from the gov registry (i also moved right after they started blocking cf)
and be prepared to increase your expenses significantly (like 3x-to 5x at very least)
Click to expand...
Thanks a lot for the advice.
 
You can use fail2ban for protection and not need cloudflare. It works, i've ran it for years and it's about equivalent, just needs more curation.

You can use a reverse proxy over SSH to bounce one website off another. You could also use this to route a VPN you control over SSH. In fact you can pipe any port over SSH from one computer to another.

here's a thought:
for russian users, you could bounce your american website off a reverse SSH proxy to a russian host.
have them access the site on another domain.
It's going to cost you some bandwidth but it is doable.
 
ES Dev Team said:
You can use fail2ban for protection and not need cloudflare. It works, i've ran it for years and it's about equivalent, just needs more curation.

You can use a reverse proxy over SSH to bounce one website off another. You could also use this to route a VPN you control over SSH. In fact you can pipe any port over SSH from one computer to another.

here's a thought:
for russian users, you could bounce your american website off a reverse SSH proxy to a russian host.
have them access the site on another domain.
It's going to cost you some bandwidth but it is doable.
Click to expand...
Appreciate your comment, I'll check some of these things out.
 
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