Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

Hi everyone, welcome to the new DevCentral! If you are reading this, there’s a good chance you have noticed some big changes to the site. This article will go over some of the changes, get you started, and introduce some of our new features.

Another platform change? Why?

Those of you who've been around a while know that the last major site change didn’t work out as we’d hoped for a variety of reasons. It has taken a while for us to prepare a solid fix, and we appreciate your patience and assistance in the process. In our ongoing effort to serve the DevCentral community as best we can, we’re proud to announce the launch of our new and improved site.  

What does this mean for me?

For most users, you’ll simply need to adjust to the renovation and have fun exploring the new features we’re all excited about. A few of you may want to make some changes to your username or profile.

OK, so what changed?

TL;dr - you can skip on over to the Getting Started guide if you don't want to read through the changes listed below.

Usernames:

Spaces in usernames are not available going forward, and existing spaces in usernames have all been converted to underscores. For example, my old username “Leslie Hubertus” is now “Leslie_Hubertus” – and while everyone now has the option of changing their username, please note that spaces are no longer allowed.

Additionally, if you had a really long handle (16+ characters), it has automatically been truncated to 15 characters. The system will automatically prompt you to update your username the first time you log in. You can leave it truncated if you wish, or change it at that time. If you decide to change your username , you can do so at any time by clicking on your profile picture in the top right of your screen, and clicking on My Settings. This will change the username associated with your profile and all your posts.

Ranks:

Our ranking schema has gone cloudy and we have added a few levels. You'll see everyone's rank next to their username. A quick note: 2 ranks override point-based ranking: MVP, and F5 employee. Do you have what it takes to get to Bespin? More info to come.

Where did everything go?

TL;dr

Questions is now FORUMS

Articles is now TECHNICAL ARTICLES

CodeShare is now under the CrowdSRC umbrella

Article Series can now be found by searching for "series," and we will be publishing an article with more information in days to come (and update this and the Getting Started articles accordingly). 

Questions has now become

FORUMS:

Technical Forum

This is where you’ll post any technical questions or observations, just like you would have in the old Questions section.

Water Cooler

This is a new feature where the community can post about anything else (within the community guidelines). Want to talk about a particular Agility session, or general trending non-political news topics? Brag about your sweet home rig, or get advice on building one? This is the place to do that. Note: Posts, kudos, and comments in the Water Cooler do not count towards your rank – but good content is good content. When really good stuff happens around the Water Cooler we may move it to make it more prominent.

Articles:

Technical Articles

This is where you will find, well, technical articles...go figure! These articles are written by F5ers, just like before.

CrowdSRC

This is dedicated to community-created and -contributed technical articles and code. It is a new and improved version of the old CodeShare. Code is of course still welcome and encouraged, but you can now also write free-form insights and solutions to share with the community. Note that the DevCentral team will review submissions prior to publishing, and all are subject to the community guidelines.

DevCentral News

This is a new featured section where you’ll find announcements, and other non-technical information from the team. Check here for Agility updates, contest announcements, team updates, and swag giveaways.

Groups:

This is a new feature we are excited about! Groups is a place for special groups to have conversations. The inaugural group is the MVP group, which is an invite-only place for our MVP cohort to converse with each other. We will be opening this feature to other groups slowly as we come to understand whether it serves the community well, For example, there may be potential for usergroups to have their own space in the community. We would love to hear what you think about the Groups feature.

Events:

This is another new feature we are excited about! This is where you’ll find links to things like Agility, webinars, trivia games, SME office hours, Livestream after-hour shows, and other events we’re planning for the community.

Suggestions:

Code syntax highlighting is now supported! Thanks to @MVP Kevin Davies for suggesting this feature!

Whether you are creating an article or making a comment, here’s how to insert code:

Click on the three dots to expand the toolbar:

 

Click on Insert/Edit code sample, and you will see the following popup:

OK, but what happened to my Follows, Bookmarks, and Private Messages?

Unfortunately, we weren’t able to migrate this information on your behalf. Please read this article for more information. If you didn’t get notification about this ahead of time, and really need the name of that one article you rely on, please reach out to us at DevCentralFeedback@f5.com and someone on the team will reply directly to you. Unfortunately, while Private Messages continue to be a feature, we were not able to keep Private Message data across the migration.

Follow is now Subscribe.

How do I Subscribe to (formerly “Follow”) or Bookmark an article?

Once you are in an article, you’ll see

And

At the top of each article, there are two options available to you. You can click on the small drop-down arrow or use the Options link with the three vertical dots. Once you do, you will see the menus as shown, where you can Bookmark (saved to a list on your profile) and Subscribe (get notified of article updates).

How do I manage Bookmarks and Subscriptions?

Click on your avatar in the top right of the page, then click on My Subscriptions, and it’ll take you directly to the relevant part of your My Settings page where you can Customize All The Things (related to your notification settings):

Customize your experience!

How do I find that article I really liked?

Labels and Tags on this platform:

Labels are enforced on new content and represent a very small set-list of high-level organization defined by us: Security, DevOps, Application Delivery etc.
Tags are those free-form pieces that the author may contribute to their own post.

You can interact with these components like this: (added tags are clickable/sortable too) 

 

 

 And you can see articles sorted by tags by clicking on them too. The red bar at the left of a post marks UNREAD.

Important note on subscribing to tags:
Subscribing to a tag is board specific, so if you want to see (for example) irules in articles and technical forum, you need to subscribe in both places.

Fine, fine, but...

How do I post a question, comment, or code?

Please read this article for a primer on posting to the new DevCentral. Besides the editor being fairly intuitive, consistent, and easy to use, one new thing we’re happy about is that copying and pasting from into the text editor should no longer result in failarious formatting issues. You should also be able to write in multiple coding syntaxes now, including GO, ApacheConf, TCL, and nginx

Guideslines and EULA, oh my

Here are the DevCentral Community Guidelines, and this is our updated EULA. 

I’m still reading this. What's next, and where’s my cookie?

We’re glad you stuck with us this long, and really hope you are happy with the changes. We do have more incremental changes planned, will be making further improvements as we go, and hope you will leave us a comment below or use the Suggestions page to share your input! As for cookies, well… that’s between you and your browser history.