"Old man yells at cloud about how the young'ns don't appreciate RSS."

I mean that somewhat sarcastically; but there does come a point where the demands are unreasonable, the technology is dead. There are probably more people browsing with JavaScript disabled than using RSS feeds. There are probably more people browsing on Windows XP than using RSS feeds. Do I yell at you because your personal blog doesn't support IE6 anymore?

Spotify and Apple Podcasts use RSS feeds to update what they show in their apps. And even if millions of people weren't dependent on it, suggesting that an infrastructure provider not fix a bug only makes the web worse.

I'm not backing down on this one: This is straight up an "old man yelling at the kids to get off his lawn" situation, and the fact that JGC from Cloudflare is in here saying "we'll take a look at this" is so far and beyond what anyone reasonable would expect of them that they deserve praise and nothing else.

This is a matter between You and the Website Operators, period. Cloudflare has nothing to do with this. This article puts "Cloudflare" in the title because its fun to hate on Cloudflare and it gets upvotes. Cloudflare is a tool. These website operators are using Cloudflare The Tool to block inhuman access to their websites. RSS CLIENTS ARE NOT HUMAN. Let me repeat that: Cloudflare's bot detection is working fully appropriately here, because RSS Clients are Bots. Everything here is working as expected. The part where change should be asked is: Website operators should allow inhuman actors past the Cloudflare bot detection firewall specifically for RSS feeds. They can FULLY DO THIS. Cloudflare has many, many knobs and buttons that Website Operators can tweak; one of those is e.g. a page rule to turn off bot detection for specific routes, such as `/feed.xml`.

If your favorite website is not doing this, its NOT CLOUDFLARE'S FAULT.

Take it up with the Website Operators, Not Cloudflare. Or, build an RSS Client which supports a captive portal to do human authorization. God this is so boring, y'all just love shaking your first and yelling at big tech for LITERALLY no reason. I suspect its actually because half of y'all are concerningly uneducated on what we're talking about.

As part of proxying what may be as much as 20% of the web, Cloudflare injects code and modifies content that passes between clients and servers. It is in their core business interests to receive and act upon feedback regarding this functionality.

Sure: Let's begin by not starting the conversation with "Don't use Cloudflare", as you did. That's obviously not only unhelpful, but it clearly points the finger at the wrong party.

What's does cloudflare do to search crawlers by default? Does it block them too?

I get what you're saying, and on a philosophical level you're probably right. If a website owner misconfigures their CDN to the point of impeding legitimate traffic then they can fail like businesses do everyday. Survival of the fittest. But with the majority of web users apparently running stock Chrome, on a practical level the web still has to work. I went looking for car parts a number of months ago and was blocked/accosted by firewalls over 50% of the time. Not all Cloudflare-powered sites. There isn't enough time in the day to take every misconfigured site to task (unless you're Bowerick Wowbagger [1]), so I believe the solution will eventually have to be either an altruistic effort from Cloudflare or from government regulation.

[1] https://www.wowbagger.com/chapter1.htm