Linode's blog gives 403 yet loads in browsers

problem
#1

https://www.linode.com/blog/feed/ is returning a 403 in Newsblur (and when posting here – Is this hosted at Newsblur or by Discourse?), but does seem to return a 200 OK to curl, and I’m able to parse the feed myself.

I’m a Linode customer and could reach out to them directly, they’re using Cloudflare and it is quite possible that something has considered Newsblur suspicious and blocked it. It would be useful to know what IP address Newsblur uses to call out, or the Cloudflare RAY ID returned in the 403 page.

Or similarly, I have contacts at Cloudflare and could investigate to see if Newsblur is tripping their bot fight feature, or otherwise is not categorized as a good bot.

But either way, I don’t want to repeat any efforts already made, or if @samuelclay has tried before then there’s no need to repeat the effort.

Same basic issue as HuffPost site gives 403 yet loads in browsers - problem - The NewsBlur Forum reports, I believe, although HuffPost doesn’t seem to be using Cloudflare.

#2

Thanks for the offer! I’ve been in touch with CloudFlare and just finished building what they needed in order to get NewsBlur whitelisted. Should be any day now…

#3

Any news?

#4

At this point my suggestion is to reach out to the contact at CloudFlare to see if this can be escalated, since they already know about my request and have promised to add NewsBlur to the allowlist.

#5

Oh hey, just got back to checking this. Do you have a ticket number or reference?

No problem if you aren’t comfortable sharing or consider it private/personal, it just might make it easier for my contact to find out about the status of the request.

#6

I spoke to John and Abraham at CloudFlare. I just emailed them again as a reminder.

#7

Ok they got back to me and are hopefully going to fix this soon. Thanks for being persistent!

#8

They’ve now whitelisted NewsBlur but still a 403. Finally heard back and now I’m escalating with Linode as they are not respecting CloudFlare’s Verified Bots directory.

1 Like
#9

I saw a couple older articles appear, and in one case I checked and they are using Cloudflare, so hopefully that is a fixed case. Sweet!

I’m a Linode customer, and although I have no particular contacts there, I could open a ticket as a customer to whine if you aren’t getting anywhere. Thanks for all your efforts, it is appreciated!

#10

Linode got back to me and they’re escalating it. The saga continues…

#11

Baby steps forward. I came —><— to spinning up a reverse proxy to deal with it myself, although that feels just a little bit like bypassing a security measure.

I might anyway as I have some feeds I’m refreshing too often due to polling from multiple clients, getting me intermittently banned from the service. NewsBlur isn’t frequent enough, my iOS client is too frequent, life is hard! But nothing a caching proxy can’t fix.

Either way, I appreciate your time and effort here!

#12

If you want NewsBlur to fetch more frequently, turn on notifications. It’ll make it every half hour.

#13

Oh really, even on personalized feeds (I am guaranteed to be the only subscriber)? I did not know that. Neat, thanks!

Actually on the topic of personalized feeds, my CamelCamelCamel personal feed is still getting a 503. They use Cloudflare so I had assumed that this would sort itself out, but it hasn’t yet. It isn’t super personal, but they also don’t let me generate a new URI, so I’d rather not post it here. Have you had any other reports of issues on this one?

I’ve reached out to them as well.