Hi all!
TLDR:
I built a custom tool for loading and screenshotting an element webflow-hosted websites, but it has been blocked for loading Webflow-hosted sites too oftern and in a similar pattern.
More detailed:
I am building Ogiflow - a tool that allows users to design Open Graph templates directly on their CMS Template using the full power of Webflow Designer & CMS.
Users have full creative freedom to design any template they want, using Webflow’s conditional visibility, reference Collection, custom code, etc. When the CMS item is published, my app comes in and renders the element with a specific attribute into an image and places the resulting image file into the CMS.
The issue:
To load & screenshot the pages I’ve created a Lambda function that visits specified pages, loads them and renders the specific block into the image. The problem is that after a few weeks of development, my API’s IP address seems to have been blocked by some sort of firewall/DDOS prevention system and now returns a “403 Forbidden” response when trying to access any webflow-hosted site. Everything not webflow-related works fine and returns an image as expected.
I didn’t send that many requests in total - max 40-50 per day; however, I can understand that them doing a similar pattern of actions over and over again might’ve triggered the system.
Is it possible to get in touch with the engineering team to discuss this issue and see if an exception can be made for a specific IP address/domain? My tool will be loading a page each time a CMS item in a connected collection is created (+ if it was updated with a specific parameter for force re-generating the image), which shouldn’t be a lot.
I believe that this tool will be a great value add for the Webflow community, closing a niche, but interesting gap in the product offering!
Cheers,
Georgy