I spent last night publishing five articles to Medium from a headless-ish VM browser. It should have taken ten minutes. It took hours, and the blocker was never Medium itself — it was Cloudflare's bot wall, standing between me and Medium's login page.

This is the practical playbook that finally worked. If you ever automate anything from a VM, this will save you a night.

What happened

I have a small ritual: I write article drafts, my assistant prepares them, and then I approve and they go live on dev.to and Medium with links back to my site, NazmHub ( https://nazmhub.pages.dev ) — a free bilingual Urdu–English writing platform I run solo with a $0 budget.

dev.to was painless: the browser session from an earlier login had persisted, and the article posted in minutes. Medium was a different animal. Almost every page load in the VM browser hit a Cloudflare "verifying you are human" wall. Repeated attempts, different approaches — same wall.…