this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2023
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[–] [email protected] 35 points 11 months ago (1 children)

The biggest offender is, surprisingly, cloudflare. They will straight up refuse to serve you any site if your user agent is not one of the mainstream ones. It's not even "find the traffic light to prove you're human", but a page basically saying "fuck you, go away".

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Well their job is to block weird bot-looking traffic...

[–] [email protected] 34 points 11 months ago (1 children)

what is more likely to be a bot? a unique and trackable useragent for a semi-niche browser engine, or a vanilla Chromium+Windows which half of everyone uses ?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Most semi and fully legitimate bots use a custom user agent.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago

what about malicious/unwanted bots? if cloudflare is trying to block bots, the bots will want to not look like bots. the easiest way to do that is to use a common user agent.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago

User agent identifier is not useful to block bots. You can literally set it to whatever you like.