Cloudflare and RSS feed

General
1

Hi,

Many websites are now protected by Cloudflare, and in some cases their RSS feeds are no longer accessible through NetNewsWire.

I understand that this is mainly an issue on the website owner’s side, since RSS readers cannot pass Cloudflare challenges. However, is there any possible workaround or alternative approach that could help solve this problem from the reader’s side?

Thanks.

2

Are you using NetNewsWire (local/iCloud) or one of the sync services?

3

Local on my mac! Maybe my VPN on is the problem?

4

For a feed that’s giving you an issue it may be worth trying the fetch in terminal with the NetNewsWire user agent and VPN on/off to see if you get different response.

5

I don’t know of a technical solution — I think the thing to do is just to report the issue to the publisher.

6

I think not much can be done for local feeds, but there’s a plugin for FreshRSS which helps me with some cloudflare feeds. I don’t remember the plugin name, but I may look it up if someone is interested.

2 Likes
7

Please look it up! It would be lovely from you…

8

I just checked and it’s not a VPN related issue…

9

So the plugin is called flaresolverr, it’s easy enough to install if you’re already using FreshRSS from docker-compose, although i had some problems with networking between containers, maybe because i use bridge networking. After you set up the plugin, you’ll need to update the feed URL so it will look like

http://[your-freshrss-url]/api/misc.php/FreshRss%20FlareSolverr?feed=[feed-you-want]

, if feed url you want contains reserved characters then you’ll need to replace them with percent-encoded ones. I set feed refresh time to more than usual, to not anger cloudflare gods more than I need, and sometimes solving takes more time than usual, so in case of failures try to increase the timeout in plugin settings. Plugin should be enough for cases when you just need to press button, but if cloudflare sends you through a captcha gauntlet I guess plugin may not help. If feed fails, first try to just wait for some time, it takes some time to solve cloudflare challenge and FreshRSS may interpret this as an error but feed will update after a while, then try to look for plugin container logs, I do it with lazydocker on my server, logs should give a hint about what’s wrong.