VPN: Cloudflare Captcha breaking filebot

[squmph]

Hi,

Long time user, first time poster.

I've had an issue for a couple of days now where submitting requests to filebot using themoviedb (GUI or CLI) throws an error. Having read a bit on here, I can summarize the error to the only relevant line:
Fetch failed: https://api.filebot.net/7372/data/moviedb.txt.xz

If I try to access that URL in a web browser I'm presented with a cloudflare captcha request which explains the problem. Completing the captcha seems to make cloudflare happy with the browser session but doesn't help filebot.

I'm using a widely-known paid VPN service. Of course as this concentrates plenty of users over a single IP a bunch of sites do prompt for verification which is fair enough, but not when it actually breaks an application!
I guess in short the question is whether there are plans for filebot to be able to bypass this in future - perhaps by some sort of handshake to prove it's the app and not anything else? I suspect others have had/do have this issue, I can't be the only one on a shared VPN!

Thanks
Rob

[rednoah]

You are indeed the only one so far. I'm not aware of any specifically related posts here in the forums. VPN issues for sure, but not this one specifically.

Unfortuatnely, your choices are somewhat limited to connecting from a different IP, not much we can do about that, CloudFlare security level is already disabled for that subdomain, but CloudFlare may very well decide to block certain IPs anyway to block denial-of-service attacks.

You could try contacting your VPN provider, or possibly CloudFlare.

[squmph]

You could try contacting your VPN provider, or possibly CloudFlare.

Ha! I think you know as well as I do that this would go nowhere!


I've resolved the issue temporarily by using a different endpoint (and thus different IP), but I do think something has changed here on Cloudflare's end - this new captcha I've only seen for a few days (it was completely different prior to that for years), and your site is not the only one prompting it.

Anyway, lets leave this as an FYI; I'm sure you'll recall it if/when it happens for more users.

Thanks
Rob

[rednoah]

Well, you never know unless you try. We'll keep an eye on it, and forward any duplicate reports here.

[devster]

I have found similar issues when using VPN on my browser, in some cases it seems CloudFlare is prompting captchas depending on source IP and not destination IP, which means that if FileBot is using the VPN it may encounter the issue.
However there should the option to download movies.txt.xz locally and using FileBot prefs to use a local link instead of downloading it from the web (at least there was). This means it won't be automatically updated though.

I attempted something similar for release groups here viewtopic.php?f=4&t=10681&p=43529#p43529

[rednoah]

Well, that'll only get us so far. A good chunk of the internet is relying on CloudFlare, and presumably so do TheTVDB and TheMovieDB. FileBot just so happens to check its own databases first. Additionally, FileBot license activation is required once in a while.


EDIT:

FileBot r7580 will just log and ignore errors related to static resources, and continue and try it's best, i.e. effectively the same as running with -no-index mode which does mostly work. Assuming that the selected online database generally works.