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CAPTCHAs for obscure browsers, approx 1% of traffic
Posted by
@Velocio
Posted by
@Velocio
London Fixed Gear and Single-Speed is a community of predominantly fixed gear and single-speed cyclists in and around London, UK.
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At Cloudflare we are performing an experiment and have been analysing some of the LFGSS traffic. This is mostly to identify bot traffic, such as Googlebot, Bingbot... but also bots that we just don't care about such as bots that scrape LFGSS to "provide information to marketers".
I volunteered LFGSS for this experiment, as I like the thought that this is a capability I can use to make the site more private and secure whilst keeping it public (by denying more scrapers but keeping it accessible and readable).
However... we only did the test for about 30 minutes yesterday and noticed something... there are some very obscure browsers accessing this site.
For example... Firefox 2, a couple of mobile phones that should have long ago vanished from existence, etc.
So we're going to do the experiment again with a tweak... for the really obscure browsers, which make up less than 1% of traffic, we're going to present those browsers with a CAPTCHA to solve. Basically... we need help refining our definition of whether or not it's a bot or really a person with an ancient browser and a CAPTCHA can tell us the difference.
If you happen to see CAPTCHAs... this is what is going on. The end goal is a good one, but we need to test a theory to get there.