I think the issue only occurs with older versions of Excel. I have an ancient version (MS Office 2010) on my old desktop at home and run into the same error when trying to open links. This is somewhat recent - it used to work fine but not any more. I’m not sure about the exact date when it changed.
I found two ways around it:
Copy/pasting the link into a browser, which will result in a security check and me having to click a box confirming that I’m human.
Opening the files with a newer version of Excel on my work computer and the links will work just fine.
What I wanted to write first (after some further testing):
I don’t believe in miracles, so my final conclusions for now: - there must have been a change in March - it cannot come from an old Excel program - since only https://www.inaturalist.org is affected (and not even https://forum.inaturalist.org/), the reason for the problem must come from there (possibly a side effect of changes that apparently have nothing to do with link access).
But testing it again right now, my text needs to be changed, completely:
Because the problem suddenly disappeared
I have to believe in miracles now. ;-)
Oh, happy day!! (but for how long?)
Is there anywhere where this bot check is announced or discussed? I have searched for, but haven’t found anything about it other than this mention here.
I think this may be what is affecting me in the other thread (that you replied to.) I would like to know if there is any way other than using the API that I could get this resolved because it’s broken something that I rely on.
I am especially frustrated because this is another one of those instances where I am being “collectively punished” for a behavior I have not engaged in.
@pisum is correct that the fix we rolled out for the social media previews seems to have resolved this issue as well. So we made a change, and that also resolved this issue – to me that suggests the fix should be fairly durable. That said, we can’t guarantee 2013-era software will continue to work with iNat in the future.
There are all kinds of bots that crawl websites. Some bots can help websites, and some bots can harm websites. Software developers in charge of keeping sites up and running have to find way to prevent bad bot traffic from slowing down, completely crashing, and/or hacking their sites.
One option software developers have to block bots is to host the sites on Cloudflare. Cloudflare hosts about 20% of all websites. Cloudflare uses its own AI algorithms to detect and block suspected bots. The amount of bot activity has greatly increased in the past couple of years because AI bots are crawling websites at extraordinary high rates to take information. In July 2025, Cloudflare blocked AI bot traffic by default for the sites they host. Mathew Prince the CEO of Cloudflare said in a March 14, 2026 interview that thinks the amount of bot traffic on the internet will greater than real human traffic by next year.
As Cloudflare and software developers for individual sites implement strategies to block unwanted bot traffic, some traffic will be mislabeled as harmful bot traffic.
Stop using that software immediately. It’s that simple. Why? It’s a huge security risk. It has not been patched for a very significant period and there are dozens of active exploits out there now.
You are running an enormous risk using obsolete software on an internet-connected computer. I would not be surprised to find that your machine is part of one or more bot nets.
Thanks for the advice, but that’s my personal responsibility.
My computers are protected by Norton - and there has been no security issue at all in the last 20 years!
I rather suspect MS patches to possibly provide new backdoors for malware.
And I will also avoid unwanted Win11 as long as possible.
btw: today the described link failure is back → :-(
if LibreOffice works for you, you might consider doing all your spreadsheets there instead of in an old version of Excel. for basic functionality, they should be more or less equal, and at least with LibreOffice, you will be able to get updates.
there are some well-documented very serious vulnerabilities in Office 2013 that even using an antivirus package won’t really protect you from.
Thanks for trying to help me.
I know, I might be regarded as a hopeless case, but …
will stick to my experience of 20 years without any safety flaws.
I consider software updates, MS Defender, etc. as insufficient regarding internet threats. Norton offers much more than just antivirus programs. Any intrusion attempt is blocked, remote code execution, etc. have no chance. (Every now and then I get reports of attacks being repelled.)
I just do it my way .. and it’s my personal risk to run old programs as long as they do what I need – the maximum damage would be a data loss of only one day (due to daily backups).