~club community opinion requested.

[deepend-tildeclub]

We were notified by a Tilde.club user that the Cloudflare network was used to host a copied version of the Tilde.club website, with the goal of promoting a crypto marketplace. This is obviously undesirable, so we are looking at how to best deal with situations like this.

In theory anyone can host a copy of the Tilde.club website on the internet. The Cloudflare network makes this a little bit easier since their network offers a reverse proxy service. This service is normally used by legitimate websites to create a fast cached version of their contents to serve to visitors. Cloudflare is the largest provider of these types of services globally, and handles up to 20% of all traffic.

The Tilde user that notified us has contacted Cloudflare support, but deemed that action to take down the copy was not taken in a timely fashion. This has moved us to ban the entire Cloudflare IP-subnet from communicating with Tilde.club. This is a drastic measure that may not be desirable going forward, also considering we encountered a single offending copy of our website.

Questions we want to consider as a community are:

• How should we deal with situations like this in general, and do we need to deal with them actively?
• Should we ban entire parts/subnets of the internet when they don't comply swiftly enough in taking action against bad actors?
• If the answer is yes, how long should a network have to respond, and consequently take action against said actors?
• If the answer is yes, how long should a full network/subnet ban be kept in place?
• If the answer is yes, do we treat all networks the same? This could mean that even larger internet subnets like ones from Google, Amazon etc could be banned if they don't respond swiftly enough. These networks take care of large portions of the global internet traffic. Cloudflare is a part of this internet backbone as well.

Options that we have:

[ ] Don't take action, this is part of how the internet works and free and open access is important. While the situation is undesirable, anyone can copy another website for their own personal goal or gain.
[ ] Contact support of a network (Cloudflare/Google/Amazon etc) in case an offense is detected, ask them to take measures and keep pressuring them until there is a resolution.
[ ] Contact support of a network and ban the entire network if they don't respond or act quickly enough (this could mean banning millions of IP-addresses from reaching Tilde.club).

[ant-222]

I am for option 2 (contact support), and if one contact method fails, use another, and also compain in their public communities (to build pressure). If all prove in vain, add that network to ablacklist page on the ~/club website (with references to the offence) and switch to option 1 (take no action).

[alexlehm]

Cloudflare are rather stringent about not blocking sites unless there is a court order and blocking Cloudflare IPs has no effect on the bad actors hosting fraud sites, usually contacting the hosting of the site outside of Cloudflare is better, if it can be determined or contacting the domain provider
I would be for #2