RSS Feed Blocked by Cloudflare's Bot Protection?

[alexandrocy]

What is the name of the domain?

mywebsite.com - This website is for sale! - mywebsite...

What is the error message?

MESSAGE AT https://www.rssboard.org/rss-validator: It looks like this is a web page, not a feed. I looked for a feed associated with this page, but couldn’t find one. Please enter the address of your feed to validate.

What is the issue you’re encountering

I am reaching out for assistance with an issue where our website’s RSS feed is being blocked by Cloudflare’s bot protection layer. The feed is intended for public distribution, but currently, attempts to access it are met with a security challenge page instead of the feed contents, causing RSS validators and aggregators to be unable to access it. This problem has resulted in a freeze of our Google News publication, significantly impacting our content distribution and audience reach. (SCREENSHOT ATTACHED VIA RSS Validator)

What steps have you taken to resolve the issue?

I am reaching out for assistance with an issue where our website’s RSS feed is being blocked by Cloudflare’s bot protection layer. The feed is intended for public distribution, but currently, attempts to access it are met with a security challenge page instead of the feed contents, causing RSS validators and aggregators to be unable to access it. This problem has resulted in a freeze of our Google News publication, significantly impacting our content distribution and audience reach. (SCREENSHOT ATTACHED VIA RSS Validator)

What is the current SSL/TLS setting?

Off

Screenshot of the error

[sjr]

Check your security event log for the reason for the challenge…
https://dash.cloudflare.com/?to=/:account/:zone/security/events

If you are on a free plan using bot fight mode, if bot fight mode is the reason, you’ll need to turn it off.

If you are on a paid plan and using Super Bot Fight mode and that is the reason, you can skip it using custom WAF rules for the relevant RSS URL.

[alexandrocy]

i am on the free plan. i disabled the Bot Fight Mode and the problem stopped! is there any way to keep the Bot Fight Mode on and create a rule only: to bypass all the website paths ending with …/?format=feed&type=rss

?

[sjr]

No, WAF custom rules cannot skip the Bot Fight Mode. As mentioned above, you need a paid plan with Super Bot Fight Mode to do that.