Here’s what you can email to publishers:
Cloudflare > Security > Web Application Firewall (WAF) > Custom Rules > Create Rule to whitelist “NewsBlur” in User-Agent “contains” field
Note that custom WAF rules are limited per account. So this won’t always work.
This would also allow malicious bots that spoof the Newsblur agent to get through.
It’s clear that Newsblur is being detected as a malicious bot by Cloudflare’s heuristics across websites. Would it be better to just find out from Cloudflare why the requests are being blocked in the first place? Then adjust the requests so newsblur IPs wont be marked as malicious/ blocked?
NewsBlur is in the Verified Bot program with Cloudflare, and I’ve reached out to them multiple times and they won’t give me any information on where NewsBlur stands.
My hope is that if enough of NewsBlur’s user make noise over on the Cloudflare forums, then we can finally reach somebody high up enough at Cloudflare to allow NewsBlur to fetch those feeds.
I spoke with a publisher this morning and he said that Cloudflare recently increased their “protection” on all of his sites as of a month ago, and that led to a large number of bots being blocked. He’s been whitelisting them individually because that’s the only way to get them in.