Any news on this one?

Okay,
a lot is said already here:
https://community.cloudflare.com/t/community-tip-fixing-error-524-a-timeout-occurred/42342

So ... time to investigate these temporary resource shortages from your side.
I released a new version of system-info just yesterday - you might want to install it in order to retrieve more details.

i get a 524 error when checking messages sometimes

Darien,

you already installed the system-info component - that's the first right step.

But you have to turn on "Error reporting" from your Ossn admin backend (Site Settings -> Basic -> Error Reporting), too. Otherwise error mesages won't be saved.

So please turn it on and have a look into the file named 'error_log' located in your Ossn installation directory when the next crash happens.

what makes it you think it has anything to do with cloudflare? cloudflare works on a dns level, meaning it deals with traffic before it reaches your website. I don't think it's even possible to modify code to be "more compatible" with cloudflare since it works on a much lower level, before traffic even reaches your webserver (if that is in fact the issue, which doesn't seem right to me, but I'm not terribly experienced with cloudflare either).

Is it same for all users or only for you? you should see : https://www.opensource-socialnetwork.org/wiki/view/1101/how-to-report-a-bug-error