as someone who has to live behind a great firewall, I find myself using Expressvpn and other VPN products by necessity - as a result I end up staring at cloudflair pages much more often than I would expect. i can’t help but feel that cloudflair is making vpn users’ lives miserable for their own gain. is there any evidence either way?
I believe this is a losing battle. Miscreants hide behind VPNs to abuse sites. Many sites are behind CF. CF must then find a balance between anti-bot and not harming legit users. Such a balance does not really exist and that results in the phrase, <i>"And this is why we can not have nice things..."</i><p>To answer your question I suppose they are as reasonable as they can get considering many sites can use CF free accounts and people can choose whether or not to enable the anti-bot capabilities. The alternative would be for more sites to build their own anti-bot measures but that can get expensive very fast. I do not see how they would gain by blocking VPN users unless one could pay to get around the anti-bot measures which would defeat the purpose of blocking bots in the first place as some botters would pay-to-play using stolen credit cards.<p>Another alternative would be for sites to find a way to create a group of <i>"trusted users"</i> and provide said users a way to bypass CF. <i>i.e. each site having their own paid VPN gateway or the trusted users put up a paid bond to access a dynamically scaled HAProxy Anycast mesh.</i> However by paying using a traceable source that defeats the purpose of a VPN and so I return to the phrase, <i>"And this is why we can not have nice things"</i>. Short of finding all the miscreants and dropping them into an ancient style Roman Colosseum Pay-Per-View Gladiator Tournament <i>with no rules</i> this problem will likely always exist.