About a month ago we received the following email and our website stopped being served right away.
Dear Cloudflare User,
We have determined that recent traffic from one or more of your web properties may be in violation of Section 2.8 of our Terms of Service ( Self-Serve Subscription Agreement ). In response to this apparent violation, we have temporarily stopped serving some of the traffic at issue. Some of your visitors may experience altered performance until this issue is resolved. If we conclude that such violations remain unresolved, we may take further action including continuing to alter performance or deactivating violating zones from the network. The affected properties are:
We immediately addressed the issue, and moved the video streaming outside of Cloudflare (gray cloud).
We reached support, and were told that the ban would be lifted automatically when their system detects the violation is resolved, however it hasn’t happened as of yet!
All our requests to support were answered with vague canned responses, with links to documentation pages that were either not relevant to our case or simply not helpful in any way.
We’ve taken our website completely out of Cloudflare for the time being, but we’re really interested in getting back - but we’re completely clueless at this point.
Our website is in the weather field. We offer forecasts, live maps, and a vivid community board. Video streaming (of live weather cams) was just a small part of our website, and as said no longer passes through Cloudflare.
The violation has been resolved long ago, but we are not any closer to getting back in.
Trust and Safety is a bit of a black box, and Support/Community has no insight or control over their choices. Some bans stay in place for longer than others, depending on the severity of the infraction.
However, if you’ve completely left Clouflare, they probably no longer have any data on your compliance, so it’s quite likely they’re no longer tracking your site in order to lift the ban.
My suggestion is to get your site back on Cloudflare, but find a way to route video through a hostname that’s not set to Proxied.
Just minutes after the ban was imposed on us, we already addressed the issue, and moved the video streaming outside of Cloudflare (gray cloud). The site stayed like that for at least 12 hours, hoping for reevaluation, after which we had no choice but to take it completely outside of Cloudflare because we were losing visitors.
All our support tickets got closed with canned responses. There is no way to talk to a live person to sort this thing out. This is very frustrating. We never thought Cloudflare would treat its users like that. To say we’re disappointed is an understatement.
How we think Cloudflare should have addressed this instead:
If they think we are in violation of the terms, they should send us an email and give us a chance to correct it! Shutting down a live site is a big no-no!
Treat us like sentient human beings and answer our support tickets with relevant content. Pasting the same laconic response is not helpful and very frustrating.
We clearly told them that we’ve made the necessary corrections. If they think there is more to do, they should tell us what else is needed. If they see that we covered it all, they should reinstate us promptly.
We think it’s the bare minimum to expect from any company, let alone a reputable company such as Cloudflare. We’ve been with them since the beginning! We praised and recommended them in every occasion and to everybody. We’d really like to keep doing that, and put this sad incident behind us.
As rough as this sounds, enterprise demands require enterprise payments; you won’t get anybody on the clock unless you can pay well for it.
It’s not like this came out of the blue… You violated their terms of conditions that you should have read while signing up for the service.
Or maybe they should blocklist the domain that violated the TOS, or suspend the client from ever returning to CF unless they pay for the damages caused, .
I feel like CF is relatively permissive with this kind of action, the fact that they even consider allowing clients that break the TOS back without any consequences is more than fair.
As sdayman pointed out, you will need to wait as these departments are rather hard to reach and follow rigorous protocols; they aren’t very talkative.
if you want to transmit videos through CF, I recommend checking this out:
Alternatively, you can also serve that content over a non-proxied endpoint, which exposes your backend and potentially opens a door for DDoS attacks.
When we signed up for the service, it was allowed.
We have no problem doing that, but such demand was never raised. Also, the “damages” are negligible, since once they detected the streaming, they blocked it. What we don’t understand is why they also blocked the entire website, which serves “legitimate” traffic.
We don’t, we never did. The video was just part of our website that was served through Cloudflare. Once the video issue was brought to our attention, we immediately took it out.
Look, we’ve been with Cloudflare since the beta. We understand that things that were allowed back then are no longer allowed now. But they can’t expect us to read the terms every day. If they make changes to it, the minimum is to let us know about them. They have our contact information, and they already send us many notifications about various things. Why not just say that starting a certain date, serving videos through Cloudflare is no longer permitted?
They obviously have systems that detect video serving, because they blocked us for it. Why not send us an email saying that it’s no longer allowed and give us the chance to resolve it?
We are not bad guys. We are paying customers, and all was done in good faith.
Proxied.
.