A few weeks ago my dishwasher broke, flooded the kitchen, and refused to drain. I went to the manufacturer’s website to download the manual so I could drain the basin, except then Cloudflare flagged me as a bot for suspicious activity trying to download the right PDF (there’s the dimensions, spec sheet, installer manual, and user manual) and I couldn’t access the manufacturer’s website anymore.

Ironically, I could get the right manual through an aggregator that scraped appliance manuals and slapped ads on the page.

To me that perfectly encapsulated the issue. Clearly the manufacturer wants owners to have access to manuals, that’s why they have the portal. But due to bots, they pay an intermediary to hold their site ransom from users. And then the bots still clearly can access it anyways.

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rurp 18 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Cloudflare has gotten out of hand for me lately. Not even solving a challenge will get me through many times, I'll just get straight up blocked from normal browsing. I guess because I do crazy things like use Firefox and block some trackers I get punished more than the average internet user.

I don't like the way things are heading. The free and open internet might be fully dead before we realize it.

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graemep a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The manufacturer does not known there is a problem. You will be counted as a bot in Cloudflare's reporting, and most people do not question that.

Why does the manufacturer need to block bots? The information is only useful to their customers. Its not like a site trying to profit from content.

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chasd00 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Just fyi the answer to any household appliance issue is YouTube.

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samtheprogram a day ago | parent | next [-]

They already knew to drain the basin. Control-F in a PDF is way less annoying than watching a 9 minute long (for the algorithm) YT video.

Sure, you can search the video transcript... but all the YT video is doing is regurgitating the manual.

	▲	data-ottawa 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		This was my thinking. It seemed easier to find the exact instructions for my dishwasher and most of the advice available was for newer models that had different control layouts. Plus, the repair manual is full of flowcharts for diagnosing and resolving issues, which is very useful.

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dlcarrier a day ago | parent | prev [-]

I've yet to find a video as straightforward as the manual. Not only do you need to find a video with the right information, you need to find where within the video that information is.

Also, videos are one-dimensional, whereas print materials are two-dimensional, so finding things is much faster.