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I had a simple parser for an external site that's required to confirm that the link user submitted leads to an account this user owns (by parsing a link to their profile from linked page). And it worked for a good long while with just this wordpress function:

function fetch_body_url($fetch_link){ $response = wp_remote_get($fetch_link, array('timeout' => 120)); return wp_remote_retrieve_body($response); }

But then the website changed something in their cloudflare defense, and now this results in "Please wait..." page of cloudflare with no option to pass it.

Thing is, I don't even need it done automatically - if there was a captcha, the user could've complete it. But it won't show anything other than endlessly spinning "checking your browser".

Googled a bunch of curl examples, and best I could get so far is this:

<?php $url='https://ficbook.net/authors/1000'; //random profile from requrested website $agent = 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/90.0.4430.93 Safari/537.36'; $ch = curl_init(); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $agent); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, 'cookies.txt'); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, 'cookies.txt'); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIESESSION, true); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,$url); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 120); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 120); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS, 10); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_REFERER, 'https://facebook.com/'); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER, true); $response = curl_exec($ch); curl_close($ch); echo '<textarea>'.$response.'</textarea>'; ?>

Yet it still returns the browser check screen. Adding random free proxy to it doesn't seem to work either, or maybe I wasn't lucky finding a working one (or couldn't figure out how to insert it correctly in this case). Is there any way around it? Or perhaps there is some other way to see if there is a specific keyword/link on the page?

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Ok, I've spent most of the day on this problem, and seems like I got it more or less sorted. Not exactly the way I expected, but hey, it works... sort of.

Instead of solving this on the server side, I ended up looking for solution to parse it on my own PC (it has better uptime than my hosting's server anyway). Turns out, there are plenty of ready-to-use open source scrapers, including those that know how to bypass cloudflare being extra defensive for no good reason.

Solution for python dummies like myself:

  1. Install Anaconda if you don't have python installed yet.

  2. In cmd type pip install cloudscraper

  3. Open Spyder (it comes along with Anaconda) and paste this:

    import cloudscraper

    scraper = cloudscraper.create_scraper()

    print(scraper.get("https://your-parse-target/").text)

  4. Save it anywhere and poke at run button to test. If it works, you got your data in the console window of same app.

  5. Replace print with whatever you're gonna do with that data.

For my specific case it also required to install mysql-connector-python and to enable remote access for mysql database (and my hosting had it available for free all this time, huh?). So instead of directly verifying that user is the owner of the profile they input, there's now a queue - which isn't perfect, but oh well, they'll have to wait.

First, user request is saved to mysql. My local python script will check that table every now and then to see if anything's in line to be verified. It'll get the page's content and save it back to mysql. Then the old php parser will do its job like before, but from mysql fetch instead of actual website.

Perhaps there are better solutions that don't require resorting to measures like creating a separate local parser, but maybe this will help to someone running into similar issue.

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