ATTN: Cloudflare Users

richard_s

New Member
I'm posting this so you don't need to go through the three days of BS debugging I endured. Cloudflare deployed a new feature called "Speed Brain" on Sept 25th. This utilizes Speculation Rules API which is supposed to be replacement for prefetch. The geniuses at CF decided to deploy this as on by default. The bottom line is that it results in double click. Just to be clear, this is double clicking links to dynamic pages. That can't cause any problems! <sigh>

For my site the issue was first identified by the unread posts feature which is one of the most popular features on my forum . Because of the double click the user is arriving at a page that has all the topics marked read. That's certainly not the only issue, server stats, server side impression tracking etc. I haven't tested it yet but I'd imagine if I hit the logout button the forum software is going to present me with an error you are already logged out. There is some posts on CFs forum about other applications it's effecting including Wordpress.

In my case:
  • I use Firefox and FF does not support this feature as of yet. It's only used by Chromium based browsers so far. I would not have been aware of the issue unless one of my users brought it to my attention. My first assumption is PEBCAK error because everything is working fine for me.
  • There is only two indications it's occurring that I have found. You'll see double request in access logs and in Chrome it will be listed in the network tab as resource. Since the action occurs on click there is nothing else in Chrome console I have found to indicate there is double request.
  • It doesn't happen on every click, it's a suggestion to the browser which may or may not double click.
  • I had deployed a major site upgrade days after they deployed this and I thought the issue was on my end. I'm hunting non existent empty href and src tags which is apparently some thing that can cause double request from Chrome.
As you can imagine this was frustrating to say the least, it was only when I noticed the peculiar entry in the network list that I figured out what was happening.

Who could ever possibly think deploying a feature like this on by default was a good idea? You would have to know it was going to cause havoc on a lot of sites and if you don't know then you need to find another job. I'm sure there is many site owners aren't even aware this is breaking their site but at least they'll be happy to see their traffic doubled in server stats. :rolleyes:
 
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