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Support #23441

closed

Commons blocked from my GC office computer using Firefox,

Added by Marilyn Weber 2 months ago. Updated 21 days ago.

Status:
Abandoned
Priority name:
Normal
Assignee:
-
Category name:
-
Target version:
Start date:
2025-09-11
Due date:
% Done:

0%

Estimated time:
Deployment actions:

Description

Via Keeping - Roxanne Shirazi, GC librarian writes,
When I try to access Commons sites from my GC office computer using Firefox, I get this error message:

You are currently viewing from a blocked IP address or country.
Technical Details
Location: US
IP: 146.96.33.110
Ray ID: 97d0eceaebd0862e

I'm able to view the site in Chrome. I tried disabling Firefox's enhanced tracking protection but that did not work.

The two sites I tried (and failed, in Firefox) to access are: https://gclibrary.commons.gc.cuny.edu and https://darcdigitalarchiveresearchcollective.commons.gc.cuny.edu/


Files

image.png (35.5 KB) image.png Marilyn Weber, 2025-09-12 11:17 AM
Actions #1

Updated by Boone Gorges 2 months ago

Hm, that's odd. Without a screenshot it's hard to know, but based on the pasted information (specifically the 'Ray ID') I'm assuming this notice is coming from Cloudflare? I'll follow up with Reclaim to see if they're able to glean anything about the specifics.

Actions #2

Updated by Boone Gorges 2 months ago

I've had some back-and-forth with our webhost about this issue. The requests were blocked because they triggered a Cloudflare security rule related to Javascript headers. The user mentioned that they'd tried " Firefox's enhanced tracking protection" but it's possible that there are some other browser extensions that are causing the rule to be triggered. Could the user share a list of active extensions? It's worth spending a moment to isolate the problem for two reasons: (a) if it becomes a more general problem among Commons users, we need to be able to identify it and mitigate, and (b) it's possible that this is not actually a false positive, but something about the user's Firefox configuration is causing malicious behavior (a bad extension, etc - not likely, but possible).

In the meantime, our team is going to take steps to loosen this specific security policy a bit for requests that come from known CUNY IP addresses.

Actions #3

Updated by Marilyn Weber 2 months ago

Roxanne replies: "The cloudflare issue was happening in Firefox 141.0 (64-bit) with 3 extensions: 1Password, Print Friendly & PDF, and Zotero Connector" - see attached screenshot

Actions #4

Updated by Marilyn Weber 2 months ago

And adds "Also: I had a similar issue with Cloudflare blocking me from accessing the GC website while I was using Firefox on a different computer at home (not on GC network). When I had poked around in browser devtools I feel like I saw a Javascript header warning or issue...can't remember, but the Commons team mentioned that so I wanted to suggest that it may actually just be a Firefox/Cloudflare problem?"

Actions #5

Updated by Boone Gorges 2 months ago

Thanks for the details. It seems unlikely that the three extensions in the screenshot would be responsible for this behavior.

so I wanted to suggest that it may actually just be a Firefox/Cloudflare problem?"

Well, if it were a general Firefox problem, it would be affecting a large number of our users. But it is possible that it's due to some specific combination of settings in Firefox, so if Roxanne is able to play with this a bit to try to reproduce with various FF settings, it may help us to narrow it down.

Actions #6

Updated by Boone Gorges 21 days ago

  • Status changed from New to Abandoned
  • Target version set to Not tracked

Closing due to lack of activity. Please reopen if we get more reports of the same.

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