On January 21st, 2025, Cloudflare placed a phishing warning on Our World of Text after an unknown party hit the site with false reports. Six days later, that same party also reported OWOT's sister website Your World of Text.
Due to Cloudflare's poor customer support system, both communities had difficulty removing the warning from their sites. But OWOT developer FP and YWOT creator Andrew Badr were able to file disputes with Cloudflare, leading their warnings to be removed on March 11th and April 9th respectively.
In the intervening time, the two World of Text communities took part in countless jokes at the expense of Cloudflare's unreasonable policies.
Cloudflare has a tendency of flagging websites without fact checking their reports. And once a website is cleared, there's nothing stopping it from being flagged right again.
Glitches
Sometimes, clicking "Ignore and Proceed" on the warning page will result in a 403 error, forcing users to restart the page and click it again.
This glitch is guaranteed to happen if the "Ignore and Proceed" button is located right beneath the "Learn More" button on the warning page.
Sometimes, clicking "Ignore and Proceed" will do nothing at all, forcing users to click it multiple times to access their websites.
Timeline
Public shaming attempt(January 26th, 2025)January 21st, 2025: OWOT is flagged for phishing[1]
January 26th, 2025: FP sends a public tweet towards @Cloudflare requesting attention towards the fact that the report hasn't been handled for the past five days
January 27th, 2025: OWOT is cleared for the first time
January 27th, 2025: YWOT is flagged for phishing
January 29th, 2025: OWOT is hit with a second phishing warning[2]
March 11th, 2025: OWOT is cleared a second time
March 29th, 2025: FP files a dispute on behalf of YWOT
Andrew Badr had already filed a dispute, but it was ignored by Cloudflare
April 9th, 2025: YWOT is cleared
Community Sentiment
OWOT
YWOT
Potential Perpetrators
Gallery
Created using a feature that allows FP to display images on OWOT's background, which has only been used a handful of times throughout the site's history.
