Like @shawnb61, I operate one of those enthusiast communities too (guitars involved, too), with a voluntary subscription/supporter setup, so, I am happy to read from someone from that forgotten part of the web.
I also feel this segment of internet might eventually re-gain relevance, seeing that social media is drowning in AI slop and also starting to be treated/regulated by governments who notice the toxic impact it has (think youth protection laws).
I do have some doubts people are aware sites such as ours still exist, if you are a TicToc-Kid and have never seen these enthusiast web projects, you might not go looking for them, so, that's the obstacle to that return of this community driven web.
We are not too far from the public realizing how calm & cool those communities are compared to what else is out there, who knows, there might be a nostalgic turnaround in some niches at some point, and maybe a search engine able to surface these sites might find an audience - but that is all wishful thinking.
Now, regarding CF: I'm on a paid plan for about a year now, and yes, configuring CF without ChatGPTs help will drive one nuts @RedBar. I can only state that the $25/month are saving me roundabout $120/month in bandwidth. I am hosting Terrabytes of audio on S3 instances, and AI crawlers loved to download heavily until I stopped that by CF, hence the savings.
The MITM concern is real tho, if you are dealing with truly sensitive data, CF might not be the tool of choice.
I did wonder about the same concerns when it comes to using free LetsEncrypt SSL certificates, I would not be surprised if we all found out these were door opener No1 for any government activities some day. That's a wild theory, admitted, and I chose to ignore both concerns for my main project.
@shawnb61 - CF can handle exactly the mentioned scenario of "I have valid users on bad ASNs" quite well by its "managed challenges" - those require solving some captcha like thing if the ASNs reputation is too bad or other factors indicate this might not be a human, so this is exactly what covers your scenario, minus the manual effort chasing ASN and IP changes.
Last, @ichthyous mentioned claude code, and he's right. I am a heavy claude user and churned out the long missing apps (iOs+android) for my community using claude. Took six weeks, cost around $500. If you can describe what you want in detail, this tool is able to speed things up and reduce cost so dramatically that it turns all your former cost&effort evaluations upside down.
If you have been around for some years and invested time & sweat upgrading php versions, servers, mobile requirements and whatnot, be aware tools like claude are capable of doing these tasks from now on. We are entering a new ballpark here, with lots of opportunities if you have some ideas. This really should be noted as a golden opportunity for enthusiast or small budget projects, the thought "this is going to be too much work for little return" really needs to be revisited with AI tools in mind.
I do feel the pain of those whose projects/businesses are going down the drain with the recent development - getting rich on organic + ads has been over for long now, and as Martin reports - doing ecommerce based on organic results must be a bad rollercoaster, too... good luck to everybody out there.
