# How to stop Discourse from crawling/embedding links
**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-stop-discourse-from-crawling-embedding-links/307951
**Category:** Self-hosting
**Created:** [May 14, 2024, 7:52pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-stop-discourse-from-crawling-embedding-links/307951 "2024-05-14T19:52:31Z")
**Posts on this page:** 5
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Genisis](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Genisis)
#### Post date: [May 14, 2024, 7:52pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-stop-discourse-from-crawling-embedding-links/307951/1 "2024-05-14T19:52:31Z")
I looked up how to stop discourse from crawling/embedding link as to not leak server ip but every post says add nginix behind reverse proxy, im not smart enough to do that, I set it up behind Cloudflare tunnel a day ago and its been working great, a tut on how to only allow cf traffic would be great or how to turn user off embedding.
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### Author:  [@Jagster](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Jagster)
#### Post date: [May 14, 2024, 9:26pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-stop-discourse-from-crawling-embedding-links/307951/2 "2024-05-14T21:26:54Z")
I don’t know, but I’m curious — why hiding IP of a server is important?
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### Author:  [@Genisis](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Genisis)
#### Post date: [May 14, 2024, 9:34pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-stop-discourse-from-crawling-embedding-links/307951/3 "2024-05-14T21:34:32Z")
bad actors can directly ddos ip if they get it, mostly ddos related. we’ve gotten hit before but thanks to Cloudflare it helped.
for some added context, you can send an ip logger and when it crawls it, they get the IP
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### Author:  [@pfaffman](https://meta.discourse.org/u/pfaffman)
#### Post date: [May 15, 2024, 6:05am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-stop-discourse-from-crawling-embedding-links/307951/4 "2024-05-15T06:05:41Z")
Security by obscurity isn’t a solution. You can firewall off the site to all except cloudflare.
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### Author:  [@Genisis](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Genisis)
#### Post date: [May 15, 2024, 11:29am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-stop-discourse-from-crawling-embedding-links/307951/5 "2024-05-15T11:29:41Z")
I get that, but for now I’d rather do that, I don’t know how to block all traffic but cloudflare