First, I fully understand that this is an advertising-supported site and that the site's owners don't seem to be interested in offering a direct-subscription model for those of us who would prefer to avoid ads. That's their choice, obviously.

However, the result is that the RSS feeds are a path to 'avoiding' the ads, and in fact I never saw any FT ads for the past few years because I read most FT content via an RSS reader which was not a browser and did not/could not display ads. This is not an 'ad blocker' but has the same result as using one.

I've recently switched RSS readers, and the new one is unable to access FT's RSS feeds because the 'Cloudflare protection' mechanism in front of the site breaks access to the feeds. I was going to suggest to the site operators that they exempt the RSS feeds from the Cloudflare protection since RSS feeds are by definition accessed by tools (not humans), but after reading the very clear statements about ads supporting the site I think that would be a waste of time so I won't ask :-)

It's unfortunate (for me, not IB) that I'll likely stop using FT now, after having gained a lot of value over the years and being an occasional contributor, as there's no way I could ever keep up using the FT web interface. It's too cumbersome and full of 'noise' which I find distracting from the actual content.

What's the RSS reader you're now using?