Diagnosing Cloudflare Blocks Before Changing Your Scraper

<p>I scrape 200+ airport departure boards every few minutes. Here's every defence I've had to break through — and the ones that still slow me down.</p> <h2> Why Airport Websites

<p>I spent a week trying to scrape YellowPages.com with Python. Most tutorials online are from 2021-2023 and silently fail now. Here's what I found.</p> <h2> The tutorials are all

<p>You launch a headless Chrome instance, point it at a target site, and the first response is a 403 or a CAPTCHA. The IP is residential. The user-agent string looks like a normal

<p>Two months ago I shipped UNPWNED, a passive web security scanner aimed at indie hackers and developers shipping AI-generated code (Cursor, Lovable, Bolt, Replit, v0).</p> <p>I

<p>In the early days of social media automation, a simple script using <code>requests</code> or Selenium was enough to scrape data, auto-like posts, or follow users. Platforms

<p><strong>Rotating proxies solves a problem from about five years ago.</strong></p> <p>If your team's response to a new block is "add more IPs to the pool," it's worth asking

<p>Most advice about scraping Cloudflare-fronted sites is asserted, not measured. "Use residential IPs." "Match Chrome's JA3." People repeat these like folklore. We run a proxy

<p>Most AI agents handle web blocks the same way: hit a wall, throw a CAPTCHA solver at it, hope for the best.</p> <p>The problem? Half the time it's not a CAPTCHA.</p> <p>I've