Yesterday, Today on the Cloudflare Community

Welcome to Yesterday Today on the Cloudflare Community. I'm your host Tim Cloonan. The Cloudflare Community is a free service available at community .Cloudflare.com and it's for every Cloudflare customer, regardless of plan type or skill level. If you'd like to know more about the Cloudflare Community, visit us at community.Cloudflare.com or join us on Fridays for a new edition of Yesterday Today. And I'm very happy that you joined us today for a new edition of Yesterday Today. Each week on Yesterday Today, we start by looking at a summary of popular topics and site traffic from last week with this Community Day and the Community Traffic Report starting at 10 a.m. Pacific. That's followed by a review of top community issues from last week with the ever informative Using the Community Tip, occasional interviews with community MVPs, Cloudflare employees and partners. And every week we feature In Class with Cloudflare where we learn a few things about the community and put them into a Yesterday Today Community Tip. Before we get started today, let me invite you to join the show by submitting your questions to livestudio at Cloudflare.tv or hit the email to the Cloudflare TV show and let us know. Turning to the traffic report, overall community with traffic was down versus the prior week with new posts also down, while last week new topics held steady versus the prior week. From this we understand that fewer people visited the community. They spent a little bit less time talking about the same number of things. Membership was up slightly week over week and remains up dramatically for the year. As a reminder, the Cloudflare community is a free service for all Cloudflare customers. Join the community to seek advice and insight about getting started with Cloudflare, using Cloudflare and solving issues if they arise. Join today, get advice and insight for tomorrow. For this community day, last week the top three searches on the community were regarding the 521 web server is down error. This 521 happens if we're unable to make a TCP connection to your origin server. Specifically, Cloudflare tries to connect to the origin on either port 80 or 443 and we received a connection refused error. This is caused by a security or firewall software and it happens if the origin server has directly refused Cloudflare's proxy attempt. Second most popular search was for a 1020 access denied error. We see 1020 errors come up a lot on the community. This happens if you're visiting a site that's protected by Cloudflare and the error 520 denied indicates that you violated a firewall rule. When this happens, you see that error and your request is blocked by the filter-based firewall rule. If you're the site owner, you can find the request that was the request that was blocked by the firewall on the firewall page under the events menu. If you're a visitor, you need to contact the site owner and ask for assistance. The third most popular search on the community last week was for 525, the SSL handshake failed. A 525 indicates that the SSL handshake between Cloudflare and the origin web server failed. This only occurs if the domain is using Cloudflare on full or full strict for the SSL TLS setting. This is typically caused by a configuration issue back on the origin server and when it happens, you'll see that 525 SSL handshake failed. The most popular category for discussion on the community last week was the DNS category with questions about name server changes leading the discussion. The security category was second with discussions about WAF and bots leading that category. Our third most popular category for discussion last week was performance. In the performance category, questions about time to byte were leading the discussions. Interestingly enough, last week we had a two-way tie for fourth place, which we normally don't talk a whole lot about, but all five of the categories were fairly evenly matched. The two-way tie is between the getting started and the general categories. If you're a fan of the show, you know that each week we take an in-depth look at some aspect of using Cloudflare. We're sticking to that format this week, kind of. Today, we're actually getting ready for a party. Well, we're actually midway through the party. It's a series of global community jams that have been happening in our offices in Singapore, London, and this afternoon, San Francisco. So today, we're going to help set the stage for our colleagues from Cloudflare that will be joining us in the community later. To do that, we're going to jump into the community and we're going to find posts that we can tag for attention from Cloudflare. To do that, we're going to use a feature of the community called tagging, and we'll actually just take a look at it and give you an idea of how that function works. If we jump into the community, I can perform a search. On the search, I can do a keyword search and return, as you would expect, topics that match, that contain that keyword. But I can also search for a tag, and I'm going to search for a tag called Jan Jam, for the January jam. You'll see there's a number of posts, 49 of them, that have been tagged as fodder for the community jam. These are subjects that we'd like to have Cloudflare employees see, view, and comment on. So our goal today is we want to tag another set of posts so that the team coming in this afternoon is able to see this tag. To do that, we're going to look at the posts that haven't been addressed or the ones that are extremely interesting. We mentioned that all of the categories are reasonably equal. We do have a high concentration of posts that occur in the DNS, in security, and in performance, and I paid particular attention to those over the last several days to make sure that we had posts that were representative of topics that are going on in that category. So today, let's continue with that. I'm going to go back to the main page on the Cloudflare community. I'm going to go to the category menu, select security, and here what I'd like to do is I'd actually like to search this for activity that's happened fairly recently and where the replies are fairly low. So we have 386 replies on this topic. Let's sort it the other way, and we find topics that don't have a whole lot of activity. Now, it's interesting that there also hasn't been a lot of activity on the topic for a couple of years, so rather than resurrect a older topic, what we'll do is we'll start to look for some of the newer topics and some of the current problems that folks are asking about. You see we did this the other day with the gateway post and tagged that January jam. As we keep going down, we'll find a couple of posts that are interesting in this category. So this is actually a post regarding Cloudflare gateway. We've had a number of posts around gateway and teams, and what we want to do is we want to actually tag this so that the gateway team, when they come in later, will see that. So I add the tag and select that's okay. So now that post is also going to be returned. The return for the tag search was then going to return 50 results, but we have a few hundred people that have said that they're interested in joining the jam today, so we better find a few more posts for people so we make sure we keep everybody really busy. Let's talk about RSS feeds. I subscribe to a lot of RSS feeds. It's a topic that I'm actually kind of interested in, so let's see how this gets handled by the team as they come in this afternoon. You'll see we'll get this infinite scroll for all of the topics that are qualified for the search, so we'll keep going through. Let's take this the proxy on the protocol error. We have a number of folks that will be joining us this afternoon, both from the US and from our office in Europe, and I anticipate we may even see some folks from our office in Singapore coming in to join this jam. Let's drop out of security and go to one of our other popular categories, the DNS category. In the DNS category, you see we have a lot of activity and a lot of traffic, and we again want to sort for posts that have a lower number of replies. And we want to find the ones that are happening a little bit more recently. This is a tax question for domain transfer on the goods and services tax in India. That's an interesting question, but I think it's probably one that's best set up for our billing team, so we'll move that over to the billing category and let them talk about it there. This is a question about load balancing for Hong Kong. Now, it's an older post for two Kong instances on the Congo dashboard, so let's actually take this post and move this into the performance category. It's an older post, and I'm assuming that the customer's issue has been addressed, but nonetheless, see if we have anybody that knows the tool here and can respond to it later this afternoon. So we went through and we've moved that into the performance category, because it's dealing with, say, performance, and then we also went through and tagged it for the jam. Oh, some moving some domains from GoDaddy. Now, this is a registrar question, so let's tag this for the registrar team, so they'll take a look at that when they come in this afternoon. If you have a particular post that you've made on the community and you're curious to get some eyes on it, send it into Live Studio at Cloudflare TV, and we'll add that to the tags that we're setting up today. We have a couple of errors around this, something went wrong, so let's tag both of those for the January jam, just to see if we can get some eyes and understanding what's going on with the failure there. Okay, I had mentioned one of our other popular categories is the performance category, so we're going to take a look at that as well. In the performance category, let's take a look for some of our recent posts. And our Kong post was just closed, so I'm actually going to go ahead and reopen that, so that the team can have a chance to take a look at it. Again, let's sort for the lower number of replies. I see one of our MVPs has shared the release notes, and does that on a pretty regular basis, so you can keep up to date with changes as we go through. Let's do take a look at this protocol, it's a little bit of an older post, but it is kind of an interesting subject. So we'll go ahead and tag that one as well. I've been doing the tagging for the last couple of weeks, and I've been doing the tagging exercise for about 24 hours now. And pretty much as quickly as I've been able to tag them for the jams, the teams have come in from the various offices and addressed them right away. So we want to make certain that we put these in front of folks, to give them a chance to give some answers on to the community. This is one of our newer posts that we just tagged. Have a lot of discussions and a lot of activity going on on the discussions already. So let's leave this category, move on to our next category. You'll notice that within the forum tool, I've got a couple of notices that are set up for me here. This one's telling me probably that there's a post that needs to have to be administered. So let's go through and see if we can find that. So this customer is looking for a solution on their site. Let's go ahead and approve that and get that into the community, so that it can get some eyes on it. And let's also tag it with January Jam, so that we get this person on the road as quickly as we can. If you are this user and you have questions, make certain to write into live studio at Cloudflare TV, so that we can include those in the comments if the team goes through them. And here's the post that we've already have tagged. So let's go through and find ourselves another interesting category. I know that the workers team has been around on this for a while, some of these jams. They're going to be around this afternoon as well. So let's go through and find the workers category, and see if we have anything that's suitable for discussion later on today about workers. A lot of workers activity going on. This is great. Harris is part of the Cloudflare team, and shared some of the workers release notes into the community. So you can always find these here. You can find them in a variety of different locations, but the community is a nice place to go in and look. This is a relatively recent post that's talking about some issues with bypass on cache. Let's tag that for the team, because I think they'd like to see that. These real world use cases in terms of how you use Cloudflare are quite, for us, quite fascinating. We want to make certain that we're talking to and specifically addressing how you're using Cloudflare. I see a lot of the MVPs have been active on some of these subjects earlier. Not certain exactly why this one has been deleted. Looks like we've moved it over into another discussion. So we'll leave it sit over in that other discussion. This is actually kind of a quite fascinating topic here. Let's go through and tag that for Jan Jam. And since we have another one that's a little bit older and hasn't received any sort of attention, let's make certain we get some eyes on that as well. Fantastic. We're up to 60 posts so far. That's great. Now, the way that the topics work within the forum tool that we're using, the forum tool that we're using, by the way, is called Discourse. It's an open source tool. And the way that the tool works is now that I have these tags added, I can simply click on the tag that acts as a hyperlink and it takes me to all of the posts that have been tagged with that topic. So this is really, it's quite a powerful way to navigate around the site. It's also a really good way to organize information that's on the site, especially today as we want to make certain that we've got content to put in front of several hundred people. This makes it an easy way for us to organize it, set it essentially all into one place so that it can be easily found by the people that are going to be looking at them later on. All right, so that's some good activity in the workers category. Let's give it one more scan here. We have some earlier release notes that were shared by one of the members of the community. That's excellent. This is a relatively older request, but it's one that does come up fairly frequently. So let's go ahead and tag it. Doesn't hurt to get some eyes on these. So it's interesting if you've watched the show for a while, you know that we've gone on a couple of field trips on the show, and we've actually gone into the community a couple of different times. We're usually going through and actually responding to the tickets as opposed to just simply tagging people. Organizing or prioritizing the tickets. This is a really helpful step because it saves the team time as they come in later today behind us. They're going to be able to go through very, very quickly without having to spend time searching and trying to organize their posts. And let's bump all of these workers threads. This is a good discussion to have. I think this user's been quite active recently as well, which is we want to make certain we get them an answer. Let's tag that. And again, anytime I see any of these topics, I can simply click through to follow all of the threads that are in that topic. I don't think we need to look at any of the posts from this guy. I put out a lot of informational posts like that. We're starting to turn the corner back into back year, to last year. But I think it's worth bringing these to the attention of the workers team. They can tell if it's been addressed in another topic. They can merge them together. They can also see if perhaps there's some other information on another site that'll help the customers. But let's not let them go unanswered. I think we had one more, about the same vintage. Let's go through and tag that as well. Ah, using a worker as a reverse proxy. Nice. We've set up a fair amount of work for the workers team. I think I know what this question is. I don't know the answer to that. But let's see if the team can share with us any of the details. So let's leave that at that. Fantastic. So I'm going to go back to the main page of the community. And again, I navigate across the various categories within the community by using the category dropdown. I can also then use the tags to navigate around the site as well. So we were just in the developers category talking about workers. We have a lot of folks coming from the product marketing, product management, and the engineering team today. So let's go through and make certain that we show them some of the feedback and perhaps even some of the product requests that they're getting. This will be, I think, really, really helpful. So let's take a look at those that have gotten some recent activity. Looks like we have some discussion going on from Cloudflare employees on some of these features. And this is a feature. So with this, this is fantastic. What we're going to do is we're going to go through and mark that one as the solution. Because that feature that was asked for in August of 19 is delivered. And since Chris had told us about that, let's see what the story is on this issue as well. This is a post from one of our MVPs that is asking a question about the GUI equivalents of the API commands. So I like that idea. Making this more viewable, making it more visible, incredibly important every step of the way. So I think that's a great suggestion. And in fact, let's keep that discussion going around this and see if anybody else that joins the jam this afternoon can give us more input. Let's take a look at the rest of the feedback. The feedback here is typically just spot on and incredibly consistent with the feedback that we receive from our customers through our typical sales channels or our customer success channels. So we get pretty consistent feedback, which tells us that the people that are hearing this here on the community are really representative of our overall population of people that use Cloudflare. So any experience that's magical deserves to be shared, I suspect. So let's get some eyes on this and see if we can get some input on this. Yeah, good, good, good, good. These feature requests typically do bring a lot of discussion because it's, you know, one person wants the feature, another person wants the feature, but it implemented in a different way. So it tends to drive to a lot of refinement and in a kind of an ad hoc way. But that feedback turns out after you kind of pour through it all to be incredibly consistent with the feedback that we get across the board from multiple other channels. And providing feedback on the Cloudflare community is incredibly easy. This is a bit of an older feature request, not a lot of activity, but gateway is moving incredibly quickly. So let's make sure that the team sees that and maybe they can throw some other input onto it for us. Good. All right. So we've gone through the DNS category, we looked at security, we looked a little bit at performance, some of the workers categories, some of the feedback categories. Let's look at getting started in general. Those categories tend to be a bit of a mixed bag. People will post about a whole range of different subjects. It's anywhere from getting started with Cloudflare to getting started with my name servers, to getting started with workers, to getting started with stream. So it tends to be a real wide range of different types of comments that come in. So let's take a look at some of those, just to see if we can find anything that needs some attention. So I'm going to do a couple of sorts by time. And I find that I have some more recent posts. This one here is indicating that I had viewed this and there's been an addition to it that I've not seen. So let's take a look at this topic. This is a January jam. So let's see if the solution solved, if it really still needs to be tagged or not. This is our 525 error that we were speaking of earlier. So the customer on this site is having this issue. One of the MVPs has identified it as a 525 error and has actually shared the community tip that will give them some additional insight into why that 525 is happening. What's really nice is that they've also gone through to check what DNS records that the customer has that are visible publicly and shared with them that there's a missing DNS record at the root domain. So that actually could be causing the issue. This ticket may be resolved, but until we hear back from the customer, let's not do anything else with the post. We'll leave the January jam on there. We'll see if any of the folks that are joining this afternoon can give us some other input. But we'll leave that tagged as it is for right now. Okay, let's take a look at what's going on here. This has no comments on it. So let's go through. Let's definitely get some eyes on this. This, the posts that say things like, you know, my site's not visible unless a certain condition's met or I'm having this issue are typically, they're a configuration related issue for the most part. And so sometimes those configuration issues are known and can be addressed without actually even having specific information. But the customers provided the URL for what they're looking at. They've described the problem. So let's see if we can narrow it down to what type of configuration needs to happen to make certain that the site shows up. Because it's not a normal occurrence that the site would simply not be there at all. Here's another WordPress question. So let's go through. I have a lot of folks with good WordPress expertise that are going to be joining today. So let's go through and give this one to them. See if they can give us some additional insight. It's a lot of coverage in the getting started area. This is great. I've seen a couple of posts come up on Backblaze today as well. So it's a popular subject. Let's get it into the mix. Now we'll do a little typographical correction there. Put that lowercase f back in there. So this is tag January jam. We've also gone through and corrected a typo, which is kind of nice. These don't have any responses. They're fairly new, but they are tagged. So they'll hopefully get some early responses very quickly. Now this looks pretty good. All right. So we've set up a whole bunch of posts for folks that are going to be coming in later. I want to thank you for joining yesterday today on the Cloudflare community. And thank you for any of the questions that came into Live Studio. I'm your host, Tim Kloonen. And I'll see you next time. For a new edition of Yesterday Today on the Cloudflare community.