Cloudflare Performance settings causing site down false alarms

“I’ve narrowed it down to either the “Auto Minify” or “Rocket Loader” settings that are causing the false alarms.”

I don’t think Minify or Rocket Loader would be the cause here. Are you getting CloudFlare error messages at all on the site? I’m wondering if perhaps all of our IP ranges aren’t being passed along or something.

Thanks for the quick reply. I’m not getting any errors on Cloudflare at all.

Since my first post, I think I’ve been able to narrow the problem down to the HTML minifying. It strips out whitespace and HTML comments, and I think that’s it. I noticed a random-ish looking string in an HTML comment in the footer of my site. That gets removed with HTML minification turned on. When I disable only HTML minification and leave all other settings on, BruteProtect sees my site as up again.

I wonder if I could hide that string in a hidden div somehow. Or maybe I’m completely off here and something else is happening.

Hi,

That seems weird (our HTML minify is pretty conservative). Are you running any other caching plugins on the site that also minify?

No other performance or caching plugins of any kind. I was using W3TC before enabling cloudflare, but that’s disabled and deleted now.

Hmmm…not sure what’s going on then. Would you mind opening a support ticket with the behavior before/after? It might help us narrow down if it is an issue on our end. We generally don’t see any real issues with minify like that, so we should probably take a look at it.

I really think it’s as simple as Cloudflare’s HTML minify removing the HTML comment that BruteProtect is looking for. I need BruteProtect to confirm that that’s how their monitoring works.

If so, some configuration options on the Minification to leave comments would work, but I know that would probably be a huge change on your end.

Otherwise, maybe I can take that verification string out of the comment, and put it in a div that’s visually hidden. That way, HTML minification won’t discard it, and the string will still be there when BruteProtect looks for it.

I’ll open a support ticket if you want, but I’m not sure it’s necessary until BruteProtect responds.

I enabled Cloudflare on one of my sites yesterday, and ever since, BruteProtect is reporting that my site is down. However, it’s very clearly not.

My sites are having the exact same issue.

“I’ll open a support ticket if you want, but I’m not sure it’s necessary until BruteProtect responds. “

Definitely let me know what you find. I actually know the plugin author.

Apologies for the delay. We’ve pushed fix for the issue and an update is available.

Thanks for using BruteProtect!

I updated BruteProtect, re-enabled CloudFlare HTML minification, purged the CloudFlare cache, and waited. 30 minutes later, no downtime reported by BruteProtect.

Perfect! Thank you.

It’s funny. I was going to use <span style="display:none;"></span> too.

Hi Stephen,

Thanks! And tell Sam that I said, “Hello!”