[olingern]

These acquisition announcements always leave me uneasy. There’s a lot of hand waving, “nothing will change and our roadmap will stay the same!” but we can all do basic math and understand that’s not how business works.

As an aside, I have to use Cloudlare at work and it’s a pretty awful experience for the medium sized org I’m at. “Hostile UX” is a common complaint. Maybe they should invest money in competing with Vercel on UX/DX instead of acquiring open source projects.

[burcs]

sorry to hear that's been your experience. i actually joined through an acquisition about a year ago and one of the main things we've been focused on is the dashboard and overall dx.

sadly "hostile ux" is a phrase i've heard more than once and we're working hard to improve. if you're open to it, would love to hear more about the issues you've be running into

[runtime_terror]

The dashboard UX has improved a lot lately but one thing that drives me absolutely nuts is that I get rate limited all the time using it.

For example, I had to recently change an env var we had on a handful of apps and opened them all into new tabs and made the changes and about half way through I started getting rate limited. This has happened to me many times and I've reported it to support and in Discord but it still happens.

One other big complaint is support is non-existent. We sent many support emails (on business plans) and I'm pretty sure we've never gotten a reply. Same for posting in Discord. It's pretty disheartening to build your business on Cloudflare and have no confidence support will help you when you need it.

[burcs]

yeah you should definitely not be getting rate limited, sorry this is annoying you're not the first to report i will dig in.

as far as support, i know there is a huge effort going on right now to improve response time and support in general, also I'm not as active in discord as I ought to be there's just so much noise, feel free to ping me on there directly if I can help brandon/@ygwyg. can't promise it'll be an instant response but I will respond

[runtime_terror]

You'd be forever my hero if you solve the rate limiting thing! One time I couldn't fix a production issue because I opened too many tabs.

Thanks Brandon!

[encom]

It's hysterical that CloudFlare is tarpitting their actual customers just the same as the rest of the public internet.

[runtime_terror]

You really think an individual employee trying to help a customer when they likely have little impact on org wide issues like how customer support is run is tarpitting? Seems a bit uncharitable

[dsl]

You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become Akamai.

The reason everyone came running when Cloudflare first started was obviously the "burn VC money to gain marketshare" but it was also the sheer simplicity. They had one product and a handful of features.

Until someone on the business side takes a step back and says "when I mouse over 'Products' on the homepage, why the fuck is there a 'See All Products' link" it will be impossible to have a usable customer experience. Start killing things and making them features.

[yencabulator]

Good meeting, appreciate the engagement, added new action items "add yet another way to do AI in Workers, say something about long schedule agentic driven" and "go to market with new unrelated Web Application Firewall product".

[rglover]

Thank you for saying this and being willing to listen.

The worst one I saw is the load balancer config UX/DX. I use CF's load balancer product for clients and so have to do a lot of setup and teardown back-and-forth. Everything related to setting up load balancers is split across multiple screens and/or "wizards" that are extremely confusing.

A lot of the error messages you get are generic at best and so you waste a ton of time clicking between pages and tabs just to set up some pools and attach them to a load balancer.

There's also some inconsistency between how things are labeled, so one thing can have two names and you have to hold that in your head while you move around the UI.

Email in profile if you'd like to chat further.

[thegagne]

I managed a large enterprise CF account from 2018-2023. Hundreds of load balancers. The UI changed out from under us 3 times, with some big problems being fixed, but introducing new ones. I gave bold feedback directly to the leaders responsible for this, with helpful suggestions on how to make it better.

I was really glad when they fixed the old one that had a big "X" that would delete your load balancer without a warning dialog. But I was not happy that the load balancers got increasingly complex, with settings hidden at multiple layers that you had to independently configure.

Load balancing IS complex, but this is their core business, and in many other places such as DNS, Cloudflare put a lot more thought into making it simple and intuitive to use.

Getting this stuff right takes lots of strong leadership and long-term decision making with determination and wisdom to provide the best experience for customers. Unfortunately I am not confident that is how the business is operating, especially with strong talent being let go or leaving due to lack of fostering of a healthy working environment.

But who will take their place?

[olingern]

The one I saw most recently was working with an SRE coworker. Data in what looks like a table, in this case a subdomain/IP address, that overflows the cell gets cut off with no ability to actually view it. I almost had him just edit the CSS in Chrome, but he figured out a different workaround.

[user3939382]

I don't even know where to start. I want to host a static site and it's a closed beta so password protection would be nice.

Let's see, first menu item Compute. Hrm, HTML isn't compute, oh it's there ok. Add Application, HTML isn't an application but ok. 95% of the page and on top are fields for adding a worker. The static page option is a little link at the bottom. Linked it to my repo. Oops wrong repo can I change it, oh, no. Ok delete and set it up all over again. Zero trust. Asked for some field, couldn't determine if it was a root domain, subdomain, URL. Ask the built in AI. It says hrm it's not in the docs, idk. Figure out how to add Cloudflare as an auth provider, link it to the static page. Team member says they can't login even though they're a Super Admin. Ah, I have to add their email manually or say all users of the account, otherwise by default Super Admins are locked out of authenticating via Zero Trust CF.

At one point I asked the AI for a copy of my email related DNS records it froze for 15 min while it output in a single textarea line char by char an extremely long key. Maybe that one's on me, but since the AI was frozen and couldn't be interrupted maybe not.

These are just the parts I remember off the top of my head. Most of us work in this field and should be sympathetic to the fact that designing a dashboard for this much data density isn't trivial. But that's tempered by CF deciding it's the gatekeeper for a web that’s supposed to be decentralized and spending a zillion dollars on engineering.

[mixologic]

Never, ever put a form into a popup. Ever.

[borski]

Sometimes it does work out. For example, Zulip was acquired by Dropbox, spun out as an open source project, and now has its own foundation backing it, along with a board, etc.

Most of the time, it doesn’t. But it can.

[yencabulator]

Well, Voidzero already attempted to rugpull the Vite project into a commercial paid licensing for "Vite+" that they then had to back out of and release under MIT because it just didn't work out.

I think Voidzero was already adrift without a plan and this acquihire is literally just that, new employment for the people behind it.

Maybe Cloudflare will allow them to maintain oxc, but expect them to writing features for Cloudflare Workers from now on.

[dbbk]

Voidzero's plan was Void their Vercel competitor

[pier25]

> Maybe they should invest money in competing with Vercel on UX/DX

That's exactly what they are doing.

[tommy_axle]

Vite is great and vite 8 was a huge speed-up so definitely a nice win for them. Remaining independent is always great but at the same time there are other "new homes" that could be worse so let's keep our fingers crossed and hope it works out.

[dbbk]

I find that opinion odd considering they've been rapidly improving the dashboard and making the deployment process simpler - now it's one click from connecting GitHub.

[gowthamgts12]

their reliability is also way way down lately. too many mishaps and i've long lost trust in CF.

[olingern]

Yes. We’re beginning the process of moving away because of how they’ve become a single point failure that’s unreliable. AWS is more reliable and it’s a bad spot to be in when your CDN / router is down but your actual application is fine

[gowthamgts12]

100%. Most of our outages were because of CF which we had no control over