I have not been to China since 2019, but when accessing my US servers from the Chinese VPN the delay is noticeable as you'd assume.

On the commercial VPN I use, a lot of the California servers usually have short pings. Taiwan, South Korea, HK, etc are faster, but having a US location is often desirable for me.

Was blocked in Japan shortly after arriving from VN with no VPN but using an IP address I've used a 1000 times before to access Flyertalk. Used a VPN to the US to get access.

I'm pretty sure Cloudflare casts a wider net than IP address.

I've experienced this on both my private VPN (self hosted on a VPS) and even on some public WiFis, I can think of the SNCF trains in France for example. Is there anything the admins could do about it? (sorry for the ping IBJoel) or should I contact Cloudflare? (their error page says to contact the site admin so I'm coming here first).

It's the only site I can think of that's this protective but I know security is always a difficult balancing act.

Norton VPN at a US Hotel using a US access point for the VPN. I don't really like using Hotel WiFI without a VPN so this is annoying.

What happened?

The owner of this website (FlyerTalk - The world's most popular frequent flyer community - FlyerTalk is a living, growing community where frequent travelers around the world come to exchange knowledge and experiences about everything miles and points related.) has banned the autonomous system number (ASN) your IP address is in (212238) from accessing this website.

Hackers and spammers have the ability to sign up for the same commercial VPNs as the rest of us. If they happen to launch DDOS attacks from the same servers that we use, I can understand why IP blocking is IB's (via Cloudflare) response.

ETA: On the commercial VPN that I use, only the biggest/fastest servers are on Cloudflare's hot list, and have been for ages. So. if I know I want to access FT (while also on VPN), I pick a server in a place like Santa Clara (i.e. not San Jose), that looks decent on the speed front, and roll with it.

Why is flyertalk a cloudfare blocking access to NordVPN users?
 

Surely this can be fixed?
most frequent flyers will use a VON and Nord must be one of the most popular
it doesn’t happen all the time but it does block it a lot of the time

A lot of malicious actors also use these tools and we can get DDoS'd if we aren't careful. To my knowledge, we recently started working on an initiative to separate bot and human traffic, so fingers crossed that will solve it

​​​​​​Hackers also like cheap (and, therefore, popular) VPNs.

I have surfshark, and in the browser app for it there is a setting to bypass via website for their vpn and other items they offer... I put FT in, and done! VPN on, FT accessible. Maybe other VPN providers have a similar option? Just a thought.

You seem to be referring to split tunneling. Most commercial VPNs, even crappy ones, offer that feature in some capacity. Personally, I prefer choosing servers that work with FT in the first place, and that's never been a tall order for me.

My VPN is blocked on FT for just a few of the 50+ different connections. Pictures don’t show up, though, on that ones that do work.

I've done a lot of playing with my VPN (NordVPN and I also tried the free trial with Proton VPN). If your VP allows you to switch the core VP protocols, try OpenVPN. I did that and about 90% of my FT issues disappeared. After that, in the case of a rare CloudFlare blockage, I simply disconnect and immediately reconnect. Basically change my IP address. ALways works.

And I never found any difference in using split tunneling or not.

A lot of Chinese websites and apps require a China IP address. If I fancy using them and also accessing sites like Google without switching my VPN on/off, split tunneling works nicely.