My evidence pipeline was saving Cloudflare block pages as evidence
I build a web service that preserves evidence of harassment on social platforms. The core feature is a single thing: automatically capture a real screenshot of the offending post. There was no substitute for it. I built an alternative that pulled the text through an API and rendered a tidy "evidence card" image, and threw it away. An image you can author freely afterwards proves nothing. Here's…
I developed a web service to record evidence of harassment on social media platforms by taking real screenshots of offending posts. The most effective method was to use the official embed from the platform directly. However, relying on third-party wrappers resulted in the capture of error pages instead of actual evidence when the domain was retired or the provider changed parameters unexpectedly.
Recording the raw error body in the database allowed me to quickly diagnose the issue, which would have otherwise remained undiagnosed. It is crucial to record timestamps in the correct timezone and assume nothing when moving components to asynchronous processing, as this can lead to missing critical steps and resulting in incomplete evidence.
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