What is the general consensus on Cloudflare with PHPBB

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sakm
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Re: What is the general consensus on Cloudflare with PHPBB

Post by sakm »

I think keywords and sitemaps are more important

I didn't use a sitemap for years but then I found the indexed pages where starting to plummet for no known reason I found an extension that works with phpBB for dynamic pages and my indexed pages are climbing back up
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Re: What is the general consensus on Cloudflare with PHPBB

Post by GentekPower »

I don't use sitemaps since the extensions seemed not well tested and it was mentioned that they're just not needed. Google seems to be able to crawl the site ok and my rankings are pretty good. PageSpeed seems to report that on a mobile platform it performs the worst, but that doesn't seem to coincide with how it really performs... We all know that coveted 'mobile platform' spot is where they're putting the weight these days...
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Re: What is the general consensus on Cloudflare with PHPBB

Post by sakm »

I have no issues with the sitemap it works well

You need a high cache for a site with a lot of topics

You can only try it and see what it does for indexing etc
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Re: What is the general consensus on Cloudflare with PHPBB

Post by GentekPower »

My site isn't very big, only 140 topics according to the stats at the bottom, but it's also only about a year old and very specific.
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Re: What is the general consensus on Cloudflare with PHPBB

Post by sakm »

One is

Total topics 54121
the other
Total topics 595

The lower one is relatively new and the larger one is 13 years old but has had a fair bit of pruning over the years

the sitemap works well on both :)
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Re: What is the general consensus on Cloudflare with PHPBB

Post by GentekPower »

sakm wrote: Tue Mar 24, 2020 5:58 pm One is

Total topics 54121
the other
Total topics 595

The lower one is relatively new and the larger one is 13 years old but has had a fair bit of pruning over the years

the sitemap works well on both :)
That's a good sized forum!
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Re: What is the general consensus on Cloudflare with PHPBB

Post by sakm »

GentekPower wrote: Tue Mar 24, 2020 6:58 pm
That's a good sized forum!
It is indeed

it took a hit when facebook became popular!! but I am muddling through
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Re: What is the general consensus on Cloudflare with PHPBB

Post by nou nou »

I finally took the CF plunge last week using this guide: https://phpbb.pro/blog/cloudflare-for-p ... -practices

It's been pretty sweet overall, apart from sometimes being logged out when I go between the forum and the ACP, after which I need to clear the board cookies (I've double checked my cookie settings against the KB linked earlier in this topic).

The analytics that come with CF are nice to have too - turns out the forum I'm administering is much busier than I thought it was!
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Re: What is the general consensus on Cloudflare with PHPBB

Post by thecoalman »

nou nou wrote: Wed Dec 29, 2021 6:13 pm I finally took the CF plunge last week using this guide: https://phpbb.pro/blog/cloudflare-for-p ... -practices
Under SSL/TLS It doesn't make much sense to suggest installing a certificate and then using "Full". "Full" accepts any cert installed on the server and most servers already have a default unsigned cert. If you have valid certificate for the domain installed or the origin certificate issued by Cloudflare you can use "Full strict" which helps insure the communications from your server to Cloudflare cannot be spoofed unless they somehow managed to obtain the private cert.

Under the Firewall suggestions they suggest not touching anything but the tools here are some of the best features for CF. For example you can create rules for country codes. China, India and other major sources of spam you can use JS Challenge. This is effectively the same thing used for DDOS protection but you are focusing it on problem countries. The bots can't get through it and legitimate users have a minor inconvenience. Of course if the bulk of your legitimate traffic is from China or India you may not want to do that.

Below that under the Under attack section. You only want to enable this when you are seeing severe issues affecting server performance because as they note it affects every user. If you are in that scenario you can switch this on quickly and focus on the problems using firewalls rules before switching it off.

Just be aware you need to be careful with firewall rules. For example you may see a lot of scraper traffic from AWS IP's and blocking them by ASN may seem to be the way to go since no legitimate traffic should be coming from such a service.... except Duckduckgo. VPN's are in the same boat, spammers increasingly are using them but it's generally not a network you want to block.

Lastly under the Real IP section they suggest installing a phpBB extension for Cloudflare so phpBB uses the real IP of visitor. While this isn't necessarily bad advice it should be the last resort as it only applies to phpBB. Log files and anything else that records IP will still be recording Cloudflare IP's. Ideally you install mod_cloudflare or mod_remoteip which covers everything.
It's been pretty sweet overall, apart from sometimes being logged out when I go between the forum and the ACP, after which I need to clear the board cookies (I've double checked my cookie settings against the KB linked earlier in this topic).


This shouldn't be a problem, you have something configured wrong somewhere.
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Re: What is the general consensus on Cloudflare with PHPBB

Post by nou nou »

That's excellent information, thank you very much!

I think I may have blocked some AWS IP ranges in the htaccess after they were responsible for hundreds of thousands of requests over the course of a few days, accounting for about 80% of all traffic. Everything still indexes nicely in duckduckgo so it might have been something else (I'll be upfront - I'm nowhere near an expert in this, I just stumbled into this by starting a forum that just happened to have grown a lot more than I expected)
thecoalman wrote: Fri Dec 31, 2021 6:42 am This shouldn't be a problem, you have something configured wrong somewhere.
Maybe too generic a question, but excluding cookie settings, what else could cause this?
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Re: What is the general consensus on Cloudflare with PHPBB

Post by thecoalman »

You do realize when going into ACP you will get prompted for username and password? You'll only stay logged into ACP for a while. You should not get logged out of the public end of the forum.
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Re: What is the general consensus on Cloudflare with PHPBB

Post by nou nou »

Yes, I know that, the logout is out of the forum entirely.

I also get it when testing someone else's permissions.
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Re: What is the general consensus on Cloudflare with PHPBB

Post by thecoalman »

Check the IP being recorded for your posts. Are they Cloudflare IP's?
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Re: What is the general consensus on Cloudflare with PHPBB

Post by nou nou »

They are mine but IPv6, they used to be IPv4. An IP lookup does show they are my source IPs.

PS. I use SiteSplat's extension for the CloudFlare IP thingie...
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Re: What is the general consensus on Cloudflare with PHPBB

Post by thecoalman »

I'm not familiar with that extension or any of them available here so I can't comment on them. You may want to try using one from here to see if you get any different results.

Check the error logs in phpBB's ACP. Sometimes you will get a listing if it's security related.
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