Thanks, Dan. I subscribed to the RSS feed.
But the Changelog only covers what’s happened after the fact. There is no info there about the other changes like Page Rules, Brotli, and other things that are being deprecated.
If I didn’t log into Cloudflare every week for client work, I wouldn’t even know to plan for getting all of my clients updated prior to a hard deadline, such as the one for Page Rules.
Cloudflare is a critically important component to our site’s function. I’m grateful that it is available.
In the 20 years I’ve been doing site work, I’ve never used any other tech/site vendor who had user settings and choices that changed constantly who did zero communication with those users about upcoming changes.
It costs a LOT of time to chase down why sites are suddenly having issues they didn’t have before, like their visitors seeing a splash screen that they were being checked prior to being allowed to see the site. Turned out to be a setting in the new OWASP rule set. The default was set to High, but then support started telling folks to set it to Medium, which we did. And then the default was changed to Medium.
Then a few weeks later the splash screen returned. The PL in that OWASP rule was changed from 1 to 2.
This is just one example of something that took troubleshooting time and frustrated clients because they lost traffic and had to spend time responding to emails from their regular visitors who were freaked out about it and thought the site had been hacked.
I know CF has reasons for tightening security. But when I have to interact with 100s of clients multiple times over a short period due to CF rule changes that are unannounced and not documented anywhere, I lose money and my clients are frustrated.
Not to mention seeing different changes on different client sites due to either the roll out schedule, or everyone not getting the same beta things. I even see differences in multiple sites that are under the same Cloudflare account.
And then for those of us who make tutorials for other webmasters so that they can keep their maintenance clients up to date, it costs a LOT of time and money to have to constantly update and/or remove tutorials and create whole new ones every single week due to so many changes that are not announced and that roll out inconsistently instead of on some scheduled bases.
My tutorials are more up to date than those on Cloudflare, which shows a severe lack of coordination between the departments making the changes and the departments in charge of letting end users know about them.
I hope Cloudflare will start thinking outside of their cubicles and take a hard look at what a day in the life of their users is like. Every tech we use is changing - rapidly. And it all has to be coordinated to work together. Not having any clue that a huge part of our site security is making changes is a real issue, and a costly one.
This is the best CDN on the planet. And I shudder to think what the internet would be like if CF were not protecting so many sites. Please just tell us what you’re doing and why - before you change it, when it’s not an emergency.