Cloudflare sets up a reverse proxy as part of their core offering, so by default they can MITM your proxy. The “orange cloud” by a DNS record means it points to their proxy instead of your server.
Cloudflare sets up a reverse proxy as part of their core offering, so by default they can MITM your proxy. The “orange cloud” by a DNS record means it points to their proxy instead of your server.
What a shame. I wasn’t expecting these dark patterns from Cloudflare at all.
That's how you get DDOS protection / edge delivery, so it's not a dark pattern. I imagine it's the main reason why people would DNS through them in the first place.
An “orange cloud” with no other indication to represent a feature that is enabled-by-default (with implicitly enabled analytics) sounds like quite the dark pattern. The UI makes the DNS record seem to point to A (your entry) but actually points to B (Cloudflare). This isn’t an oversight, it’s an attempt to obfuscate.
Even if the choice to enable it by default makes sense for Cloudflare’s userbase, the implications are hidden and non-obvious.
It's essentially the entire reason to use Cloudflare.
As sibling mentions it is indeed labeled and not just some icon. People just refer to the orange cloud UI for it for convenience and because it makes it easy to spot whether you have it on or not.
But regarding the icon, the icon is their company logo, it really is the primary feature. It's also not like you have to go find it in settings to turn it off after adding DNS record, it's part of the form when you add the record (default on, yes), and it's prominent when viewing the record.
I don't buy that, there is no reason for 99.9999% of sites to use cloudflare.
The "reason" to use cloudflare is hype.
The options are actually labelled as 'Proxied' or 'DNS Only', so that is actually quite clear.
I would say that Cloudfare having customers who don't know exactly what they are getting (into) is actually a Cloudfare problem they should take responsibility for.
I would say its up to the user to research what they are using.
That’s not a dark pattern. That’s one of the core reasons to use Cloudflare.
And of course by extension it is also one of the core reasons not to use Cloudflare.