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The Cloudflare page that BCTS is being routed through has broken my @Voice Aloud Reader (text to speech) on my Samsung Android tablet again. I can route to and read the stories on BCTS using my eyes just fine, but when I select a story to be read with @Voice Aloud Reader, the text from the Cloudflare page is what gets sent to the @Voice Aloud Reader app. I've tried clearing the history in the browser I'm using (Chrome) with no change/improvement.
This bit of fun began yesterday and is still happening as of just before this posting. While this is a pain when it occurs, kudos to Erin and the gang. It doesn't happen very often. The last time I'm aware of was in February 2021.
Comments
Referred to Piper
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Cloudflare
I am old and set in my ways. It has gotten to where I don't get along with new stuff cause it is different and IMHO not necessary in a lot of ways. I still use internet explorer cause that is what I was forced to when Netscape navigator and that other oldie quit working. Now IE , is retiring. I can no longer hget to utube with it, and in the last few days, fanfiction.net and bcts, both refuse it. The redirection page just sits there flashing the 5second wait for hours at a time. I absolutely hate google and chrome as they are so invasive, and force you to use their product. I can use Firefox and the big o on my laptop, but neither is as convenient to use,. And Firefox keeps wanting to change my settings and turn on stuff I prefer to leave off like my location and directed ads due to following my surfing, not to mention Firefox gets updated at least twice a week. I figure it all comes down to built in obsolescence oneverything from the car to the reefer, to the TV set. I have not been able to sync my ,zMP3 player or my iPod in 4 years. Just have to fight off the urge to pick the hammer, or the Glock and put up with it. Rant over. I agree with you cloudflare may make life easier for you, but like anything else , it can be a pain.
.
Um
At the moment, Cloudflare is not making life easier for us, but it is making BCTS possible. We currently have sensitivity to threats set fairly high (which is what sends out those pages) because we are still being threatened. Without CF, we would simply have to turn BC off.
We are researching other methods to eliminate threats and secure our servers, but for now, the CF firewall is making it possible for us to serve BCTS to the community. Piper has already spent a couple of sleepless nights working on this, so life ain't easier, it's harder.
If you do keep seeing the warning page, please clear your browser cache to make sure that is not the problem. We're not deliberately blocking any browsers, though we do block some particular IPs in the old Soviet Union.
Cloudflare is not the problem. Malicious hackers and spammers are.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Cloudflare
I totally understand and was not ragging on anyone here at bcts. It is just some idiot making life hard on everyone else while he plays. They are the problem, not you. And people wonder and laugh at my phone when I use it. It is on Verizon service, but, costs me @15.00US a month and I have to flip it open to use it. Now I have to buy a new one cause they are doing away with the 3G network it uses, forcing me to lay out big bucks to buy and more for the privilege to use it. You just keep doing what you need to do to stay operational .
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
I'm old school myself. I refuse to use something just because it's new or some pencil neck geek thought he needed to do something to justify his job. If I choose to use some new enhancement in computers it's because I've seen an advantage. Most of the "enhancements" are fixes for which there is no known problem.
I haven't had the trouble with Firefox that you have. It's my preferred browser. I get ticked when I go to site that I really need to go to because it's the only place I can do the business I need to do and they tell me that their site won't work with Firefox and that I need to use Chrome or Safari. This happens when ever I need to do a video visit with my doctor. Firefox used to work just fine until some pencil necked geek decided to fix it and make the site compatible with Chrome only.
I don't use Google anything because I don't trust them to keep their hands off my data and once they have it not to sell it. And Kaiser (my Advantage + provider) has chosen to make Chrome the only way to access the portal. With the covid thing going on it's the only way to talk to my doctor. :o( !!!!
Hugs
Patricia
Happiness is being all dressed up and HAVING some place to go.
Semper in femineo gerunt
Safari
I forgot about that oldie. I think I tried it last year, again. I do believe it is a stripper out remake of a browser I used 20 years ago. Think I'm gonna give it another chance. opera was okay, but refused to do things like my preferred, save as text, and was not as easy to get around in.
So far
Safari, developed by my brother's team at Apple, was based on the Apple fork, WebKit, of the Linux browser Konqueror's kernel, KHTML. There are other browsers based on either WebKit, Konqueror or KHTML. The original version of Chrome was based on a Google fork of WebKit. (Current versions of Chrome have a new, rewritten kernel with very little left of the original).
Don retired from Apple about ten years ago, so he's not responsible for the current version of Safari. :)
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Mozilla
Which all other current browsers, chrome, safari,ie etc; all use functions Mozilla put into play first. It has been kinda the forefront of browser for over a decade. When Netscape was taken over by aol, and then fubared up and abandoned by everyone, Mozilla replaced it with Firefox and a few others. Still works fine for a lot of things and is updated often with security patches as well as many other things. Lots of addons available for video and editing.
Chrome is a pain in the asp to use as it basically wants to collect all your info and share it with others.
Current safari is what is used on iPads and iPhones.
Just install Chromium. You
Just install Chromium. You'll get almost all the functionality of Chrome, with no of the interfacing unless you -want- to do it.
There's a reason why that's one of the preferred "adware install" browsers.
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
re: Pencil necked geek
What a lovely description. I shall have to remember that when I have a meeting on Friday with the [redacted] developer of the software that runs my EV charger. He refuses to accept that one of the latest changes has nuked the very feature that led me to buy that charger in the first place.
That's life.
Samantha
I take it he's claiming the
I take it he's claiming the feature still works, and you're just using it wrong?
I've been using HTML since the very beginning - PRIOR to NCSA Mosaic.
WAIS (plus GOPHER and ARCHIE before that)
Even NCSA was roughly patterned after GOPHER and WAIS. Too bad they never got any credit for it. (I used to use NeXT workstations. So you could say I used OS X before Apple did.)
BW
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
NeXT really was NeXT!
I've been contemplating emulating NeXT just to experience it.
You might be able to track
You might be able to track down NeXTStep - that was an i386 operating system load that should work, at the least, on a platform up to the original Pentium (which I found ways to crash in NT 3.1) The university had a stack of dual boot NT/NeXTStep systems; I just preferred the NeXT workstation. I did my papers in LaTEX.
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
Kaiser and Firefox
I also have Kaiser Medicare Advantage, and I have no problem accessing the Kaiser website with Firefox (currently 99.0.1 64-bit). When I worked at Kaiser prior to retiring in 2013, they intentionally designed their websites to work only with Internet Explorer. They have since abandoned that attitude, possibly because of all of the documented vulnerabilities with IE. However, I haven't tried, and don't expect to try, video visits with my doctor.
I agree with distrusting anything Google makes, including Chrome. I don't trust them with my data.
It's Been a While...
...but my desktop computer's browser is Firefox, and it never had any trouble with Kasier's site. In fact, it even gives an estimate on prescription costs, while my MacBook with Safari (Version 13.1.2 (13609.3.5.1.5)) says "unable to calculate" in that column. (On Mom's 2013 IPad, which somehow never got any updates, the version of Safari there will bring up the Kaiser home screen after checking in, but won't do anything there, not even scroll down.)
Eric
My @Voice Aloud Reader Has Been Working All Day
Yeah! Thanks to Piper and all the workers at BCTS.
Everyone take care,
cbee
Kindle browser
The kindle browser was also affected (back now), at least I was able to revisit some Tanya Allan stories. I now know I am not the only nutter on here using strange devices.
Many thanks, and get some sleep ;)