I thought I might post this here to see if anyone has any suggestions.
I purchased a new Kindle Fire 8 a couple months ago and finally got around to setting it up.
For some reason it will not allow me to access a forum that I frequently visit because Cloudfare’s human verification bot gets stuck. It keeps looping and never actually gets to the site.
I’ve tried a number of things including syncing the date/time, restarting, checking for updates, fussing around with different settings, etc.
Kindles will not let you download another browser without some effort and I really don’t want to do that.
Oddly my two other Kindles which are 4 and 6 years old work just fine as does my mobile and my desktop computer.
I am stumped why just one device in my house has this issue.
I’ve gone to the Cloudfare Community and Cloudfare subreddit but it seems to be an enduring mystery.
I just want to shout into my device and tell it to please believe I am human.
From what I have read there are many sites using Cloudfare now and I will be locked out of them with this brand new device.
I may have to consider buying a Samsung tablet in the future and retire the Kindle Fire tablets.
I know you mentioned this, but the first thing I would try would be a different browser (e.g. Fennec). If you first install F-Droid, you can install/uninstall stuff with no effort. I have installed F-Droid on a Kindle Fire 8 via plugging it into a computer (which already had Android tools on it) using a USB cable, so, yes, it was some effort in that sense, but a whole lot less than the messing with the settings and so on that you describe in your post.
For what it’s worth, the reason you’re having this problem is almost certainly related to the suddenly stratospheric level of scraping activity being conducted by AI bots.
The AI companies are vacuuming up everything on the internet to train their language models. The amount of traffic is incredible, and has become destabilizing and sometimes incapacitating for smaller websites with limited bandwidth. The scrapers are supposed to respect the website’s configuration if it tells the bots not to scrape, but the AI companies are already operating in an ethical gray area and many of them disregard the configuration and scrape anyway. To defend themselves, many websites have turned to Cloudflare to try to block the bots from entering.
Here’s a background article if anyone wants more information.
It’s possible that you’re originating from an IP zone that has significant bot traffic, and as a result Cloudflare is raising a stiffer defense for you. It could also have something to do with your browser configuration that’s tripping their automated alarms. It’s impossible to say, really.
This doesn’t help you solve your problem, but it does provide some sense of why it’s happening.
And if the AI scrapers aren’t reined in, then the problem is going to get a whole lot worse, for all of us, before it starts getting better.
This is exactly the reason. The forum has been troubled by swarms of bots in recent months and this is the solution for now. And everything is fine except for my brand new out of the box kindle lol.
OK; let me know if you have any issues! The specific tool you need on your computer is adb (in order to install the F-Droid.apk file). Running adb install F-Droid.apk after downloading the apk file worked for me. You probably also need to enable Developer Options → USB Debugging on the tablet.
Now that I think of it, you may be able to avoid all that if you can simply download and install the APK from your current browser; see Option 2: