> How is having a specific definition relevant to this conversation?
Because it's a computer that automatically does it. That's the entire problem here. Humans are not in the loop, except collecting the paychecks.
> An approximate definition of "a human using a browser to visit a site" probably suffices
Humans are not doing the blocking. "Approximate" is not good enough when, for example, I need to go to a coffee shop and use an entirely different computer to trick cloudflare into letting me order from my longtime vendor. And I must repeat that my work computer is doing absolutely nothing interesting. My job and livelihood depend on this.
> without having to get into weird edge cases like "but what if they programmed lynx to visit your site at 3am when they're asleep?".
What about an edge case like 'using your bone stock phone to visit a site once'?
What about all the poor suckers that installed an app that loaded legal software designed specifically to use their phone's connection for scraping a la brightdata? Residential proxies are big business.
There are billions of users on the web. It is one gigantic pile of edge cases. And that's entirely the point. CF may get some right but they also get plenty wrong with no recourse (but now you may be allowed to pay them money for access).
> So they're damned if they do, damned if they do?
Yes. Their entire business model is "we have a magic crystal ball that only stops 'the wrong people'™ from your website".
> God forbid that site operators have agency over what visitors they allow on their sites!
They quite literally don't have that agency. This goes back to "define bot". There are zero websites that would want to block me from making purchases from them and yet that is exactly the result in the end. I had to change vendors for a five figure order because I was up against a deadline and couldn't get around the cloudflare block from my office, and the vendor had closed for the night so I couldn't call them and bypass the whole mess.
Afterwards we spent nearly a week trying to figure out how to let me buy from them again and they were willing to keep going back and forth with CF on my behalf but I was over it and not going to spend any more time. Now I'm using the non-CF vendor to their disappointment. So much for agency.
> I use ublock, resistfingerpnting, and a VPN. That probably puts me in the 95+ percentile in terms of suspiciousness. Yet the most hassle I get from cloudflare is the turnstile challenges can be solved by clicking a checkbox.
Good for you? I have a bone-stock computer on its own connection just to try to work around this BS and yet I still sometimes get an infinite loop where the checkbox never goes away.
When I have my VPN to our euro office on I am 100% unable to access CF sites whatsoever. Been that way for as long as I can remember.