If you run your own feed reader (I use Miniflux) you might find that you can’t successfully follow some feeds that are behind Cloudflare, because their aggressive “Bot Fight Mode” is doing what it says: aggressively preventing automated access, without any regard for the fact that automated access is exactly the point of RSS and Atom feeds.

Instead of returning the feed, Cloudflare returns an HTTP 403 Forbidden response along with HTML containing a “Verify you are human” challenge that a feed reader obviously can’t solve. And that’s if you’re lucky: sometimes it simply blocks access to the site for your IP address, even when accessed from a browser.

Cloudflare do have a verified bot programme but it’s only really feasible for large-scale operators, rather than individuals running their own feed readers.

Fortunately, the people at OpenRSS have managed to get their bot verified by Cloudflare, which means that you can use the OpenRSS feed for a site that’s otherwise blocked. So, for example, instead of

https://example.typepad.com/path/rss.xml

use

https://openrss.org/example.typepad.com

and you’ll get a working feed that isn’t blocked.

In memory of Aaron Swartz.