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Really interesting. I never heard of this website and was surprised to hear this volume of traffic it's getting. (I always used curlmyip.org or whatsmyip.net|.com). I wonder what is the rationale for providing a non-rate limited service that can be easily abused like this. The volume almost suggests some stuff like IoT devices or other software use this to test internet connectivity. Or botnets?

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>Seeing that over 90% of my traffic load was malicious and abusive was frustrating. Dealing with the abuse emails and complaints was worse.

My take. I suspect Cloudflare benefited allowing that traffic. It's another data point/tool in their toolbox against the baddies.

That was something I discussed with them and I certainly hope they're doing it now. ;)

I believe that creating a traffic rate-limiting system, which is more cost-effective than simply echoing back the requestor's IP address, is likely to be a complex task. However, I haven't personally performed the calculations to confirm this.

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