Stop Spammers and CloudFlare

In previous version I was trying to work around CloudFlare in the Stop Spammers plugin. I would suggest to people that if they use CloudFlare that they must turn on the CloudFlare Plugin supplied by CloudFlare.

Unfortunately, only a few users actually do this and as a result the Stop Spammers plugin is not very effective for most people who use CloudFlare. If CloudFlare is an automatic feature provided by their hosting company, they might not even know it is there.

I just reversed my position and the plugin now detects CloudFlare and fixes the IP if it is found. It only does this if the CloudFlare plugin is not installed and active.

This is a real issue in that I need to update my plugin when CloudFlare changed its plugin. It would be much easier if every hosting company that uses CloudFlare as feature would correct the IP right in Apache so that PHP would always see the real IP.

I am running this website under CloudFlare using my plugin with the CloudFlare plugin turned off. Soon, CloudFlare will start caching pages and I should see hits with a CloudFlare IP. I will be able to tell then if the plugin works.

I have many new things in the plugin and I am eager to release it. CloudFlare is holding it up.

On a excited note, the coding of the CloudFlare fix got a little complicated and I thought suddenly that a GOTO would have solved the problem. I remember that PHP still supports a GOTO. I had the pleasure of putting a GOTO into my code and it works!!! I haven’t coded a goto in a high level language in 25 years. It was a great pleasure to to it. Dijkstra be damned!

Keith

This entry was posted on Friday, February 27th, 2015 at 12:41 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

5 Responses to “Stop Spammers and CloudFlare”

  1. David says:
    06/20/2015 at 6:59 am

    Thanks for the help Keith!

    Cheers

    David

  2. Keith says:
    06/19/2015 at 1:20 pm

    I think that CloudFlare only needs to update their plugin when they change IP address ranges, and they did that a few months ago.

    If you click the whois icon on the cache or report screens you can see who owns the ip that is sending you spam. If it says CloudFlare then you can add the IP to the white list. If the IP is one that CloudFlare is using, but not listed in the plugin then you should complain to CloudFlare.

    Keith

  3. David says:
    06/19/2015 at 4:54 am

    Thanks Keith,

    I have the cloudlflare plugin installed but I also noticed that cloudflare seldom updates their wordpress plugin 🙁

    Other than that, is not much we can do to avoid showing the wrong ip can we?, but will this increase the likeliness of false positives?

    Thanks

    David

  4. Keith says:
    06/17/2015 at 2:02 pm

    If you have CloudFlare, you need to install the CloudFlare plugin.

    I update the CloudFlare part of my plugin, but not as often as CloudFlare updates theirs.

    Keith

  5. David says:
    06/17/2015 at 1:06 pm

    Hi Ketih,

    Thanks for all the effort you put to keep updating Stop Spammers. I noticed you have been quite active with updates lately!.

    Question for you. I had a few false positives on visitors trying to leave a comment and when I check on the cache I’ve found that were rejected because bad cache but the IP shown is from Cloudflare. I use cloudflare and I have the plugin latest version installed.

    Have you noticed any change on Cloudflare that prevents the plugin to see the real address?

    Thanks

    David

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