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Stork Wire · install help

Your firewall is challenging our checker.
Here's the two-minute fix.

If your install check came back HTTP 429 or "challenged", your site's bot protection is working exactly as designed — it challenges every non-browser client, and our install checker is one. One scoped rule for /news fixes it without weakening anything else.

What's actually happening

Hosts like Vercel and Cloudflare now ship bot protection that answers automated clients with a JavaScript challenge. Your human visitors never see it, and the big verified crawlers — Googlebot, Bingbot, GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot — are exempted by your host. Two things do get challenged: our install checker, and the newer AI crawlers that aren't on your host's verified list yet.

Exempting paths starting with /news lets both through. That path serves your Wire paper — public articles we host — so the exemption exposes nothing of yours, and you can delete the rule at any time.

If your site is on Vercel

Four clicks in the Firewall tab

  1. 1

    Open your project's Firewall tab

    In the Vercel dashboard, pick the project that serves your domain, then click Firewall in the left rail. Under Bot Management you'll see Bot Protection set to Challenge — that's what's answering our checker with a 429. Don't turn it off; you only need an exception.

  2. 2

    Add a custom rule

    Click Rules → New Rule. Name it anything ("Stork Wire bypass"). Configure the condition: Request Path · Starts with · /news. The operator must be Starts with, not Equals — your articles live under /news/….

  3. 3

    Set the action to Bypass

    In the Then section choose Bypass — not Log, Allow or Challenge. Bypass is the one that exempts the path from Bot Protection.

  4. 4

    Save, then publish

    Click Save Rule, then back on the Rules page click Review Changes → Publish. The rule is not live until published — this is the step most people miss. Then hit Verify in your Stork console.

Firewall → Bot Management

Bot Protection

Challenge requests from non-browser sources, excluding verified bots

Challenge ▾

This is the setting challenging our checker. Leave it on — the rule below exempts only /news.

Firewall → Custom Rules → New RuleSave Rule

Name

Stork Wire bypass

If

Request Path
Starts with
/news

Then

Bypass ▾

If your site is behind Cloudflare

Depends on your plan

Pro plan and up — Super Bot Fight Mode

Go to Security → WAF → Custom rules → Create rule. Condition: URI Path · starts with · /news. Action: Skip, and tick Super Bot Fight Mode in the list of components to skip. Deploy the rule.

Free plan — Bot Fight Mode

Cloudflare's free-tier Bot Fight Mode runs outside their rules engine, so no skip or bypass rule can except it — that's a documented Cloudflare limitation, not something we can work around. Your two options: turn it off (Security → Bots), or upgrade to Pro where Super Bot Fight Mode supports exceptions.

Built on Webflow, Framer, Squarespace, Wix, Carrd or GitHub Pages?

A different problem — no place for the rewrite

These platforms can't proxy a path to an external origin, so the two-line rewrite from your install card has nowhere to live. Don't start the subscription until this is solved — you'd be paying for a desk that can't publish. The fix that works for all of them: free Cloudflare in front of your domain, and a ten-line Worker that serves /news. Your site stays exactly where it is.

  1. Add your domain to Cloudflare (free plan) and switch your nameservers where you bought the domain — Cloudflare shows you the two to use. Takes ~30 minutes, almost all of it waiting for DNS. Set SSL/TLS mode to Full so your builder's certificate keeps working.
  2. In Workers & Pages → Create Worker, paste the script below, replacing YOUR-KEY with the key from your install card (the part after /wire/).
  3. Give the Worker a route for yoursite.com/news* so it only answers there.
  4. Back in your Stork console, hit Verify.
export default {
  async fetch(request) {
    const url = new URL(request.url);
    const rest = url.pathname.replace(/^\/news/, "");
    return fetch("https://www.stork.ai/wire/YOUR-KEY" + rest + url.search);
  },
};

This touches DNS, and DNS deserves respect. If any of it feels uncomfortable, email support@stork.ai before signing up — we'd rather walk you through it first than set you up on something we can't deliver.

Another host, or not sure?

Netlify, Render, Railway, Fly.io, Heroku, DigitalOcean: none of these challenge non-browser traffic by default, so if your site lives there you most likely don't need this page at all — run the self-test below to be sure. AWS CloudFront with WAF Bot Control: that's opt-in, so if you turned it on you know where it lives — add an allow rule scoped to paths starting with /news.

The self-test: run curl -I https://yoursite.com/news from any terminal. A 429 or 403 means a firewall is challenging non-browser clients. Whatever the platform, the goal is the same: allow plain GET requests to paths starting with /news. Nothing else about your setup needs to change.

Stuck? Email support@stork.ai with your domain and we'll tell you exactly which setting is answering.

Back to your console → hit Verify

Rebuilding the rewrite itself, not just the firewall exception? The install guide has every platform's rule →

New here? What Stork Wire is →