DevCentral official reLaunch and NEW SignUp
Hello Again - We have tested and pushed a fix for the widespread SAML assertion error. Going forward we expect users should successfully login and engage with the community as designed. While we recognize this was a less than desirable launch experience, please know that we absolutely feel your pain. Your feedback is heard loud and clear and, by all means keep it coming. We still need to capture your current experience so we can document feature enhancements going forward. We *know* that the DevCentral community is what it is because of awesome members like you. We value your contributions above all, and we continue to work to bring you the community experience you expect and deserve. ---- BACK AGAIN with another important update. DevCentral is currently experiencing a login issue preventing several users from logging in. You will see this as a SAML assertion failure. A permanent fix is currently being worked as our highest priority.
IMPORTANT UPDATE (does not apply to F5 Employees) The first time community members access DevCentral (after May 15th) you must choose SIGN UP for a *new* account on our *new* platform. You will provide *new* authentication credentials and THEN, in the second step you will have the opportunity to provide your previous credentials in order to MERGE available previous content. The merge will include your previous DisplayName. Going forward, DisplayName must be unique. If you have problems beyond this process please contact us with as much detail as you can and we'll help you out. Thank you for your continued patience.
Today DevCentral has reached the end of an intense couple of months - but this is really just another beginning. Allow me to paint a picture...in your mind
- In late 2018 we were like, --Somewherrrrre over the rainbow….
- Then, a couple weeks ago, things got real and we were like,--Tornado!
- But then we nailed it; and we were like, --Pretty colors. and --Munchkins are cute!
- Suddenly, a huge puff of "read-only" smoke, and we were like, --A Witch!
- And THEN, with the support of some key people on our team and in the community, we were like --There's no place like home.
So, we stayed that way for this past week, put in some more hours, and gathered our courage for today.
Today we are happy to launch YOUR new community website.
Take a look around and give us your feedback. We have our eyes on the horizon and our ears directed squarely at you.
Some last minute housekeeping...
- Starting today you will need to SIGN UP for a new account on our new platform. Don't worry, the SIGN UP process will provide you the opportunity to merge your previous DevCentral account and all of your DevPoints into this new account.
- A guiding principle was to make sure we preserve historical content, your content, and we took extra efforts to bring as much of that forward as we could.
Thank you for being part of our community!
Published May 15, 2019
Version 1.0
- JRahm
Admin
Hi All,
Rather than responding to all the individual threads, I'll compile here.
- Regarding search, embedded links, and bookmarks, I wrote about this last week: "We have some limitations we’re working through, so outside of the individual API landing pages, your embedded links and bookmarks are unlikely to land properly. Also, search will take some time to rectify itself, but If you navigate directly to https://clouddocs.f5.com/api/, you should be able to quickly click through to your content."
- We are aware of the power of BIG-IP and iRules. I've written just a few here and there over the years. Our hosted solution makes this not possible at this time.
- If you want an offline copy of the wiki the way it (mostly) was, you can download it here.
- We are troubleshooting the login issues actively and will provide updates as we learn new information.
- Stronger supporting documentation is coming for merging your old accounts, but favorites were not ported over, you'll need to rebuild those.
John_DoeAltostratus
Worst idea ever - unconditionally move loyal users to new (and ugly) design.
- material design in not that fancy for most of the users who do work and not hanging out on devcentral website
- ugly and unreadable font for articles headers - somebody in F5 devcentral design team has impaired vision? Go ahead, buy glasses, contact lens or eve do yourself a present - make an eye vision operation. WHAT THAT BOLD FONT IS FOR??? With condensed space between letters. Are there any UI/UX pros in F5 team or none? It that none of at this moment.
- Why no option to use old design? Come on, its 21st century out of the office - plenty of computatiional resources out there - make a mirror of website with _usable_ design and look and feel.
- Blue design. Now F5 and A10 is the same. Yep.
- Search fail. Google is the main source for navigation. Not your website. GOOGLE. Not your website. It is an additional step in reach to process: go to devcentral, login instead for serarh-google and move to page
- LOGIN. WHAT IS THAT FOR ON EARTH?!?!? Are guys have KPI for DAU and MAU on devcentral??? Are you a social network? And not just network hw/sw commercial vendor? Are-you-sure?
- Did those "smart people" (note the quotation marks) tried look and feel of new design in various browsers? What about pages/questions/articles TITLES? Informative titles ARE GONE. Instead of "kerberos sso for apm" now it's just like "Feed" for a page title. You, "smart people" just can not be SO "smart" - it's impossible fk up with usability.
- What about pipls bookmarks?
I think it's just new manager, head of department or something.
A new gyu. Promoted or just freshly hired.
Who need to "show something for what we've paying you money".
FIRST RULE: It works? DO NOT (ever) touch then.
***
Would you, Devcentral, please, return back following functionality a lot of f5 customers used a lot:
- availability to jump to dc pages from google (and yes; nobody cares about your kpi for dau/mau; remove this "0D51T00006j2WCYSA2" from uris)
- informative page titles. as was before.
DC is supportive mechanism for sales. It doesn't generate sales itself. DC head thinks he (or she or whatever it's gender) is important guy in F5? No it's not.
DC. is. supportive. thing. Let it be so. Let DC perform its main function - streamline process of getting tech info and interchange.
Thank you in advance.
NOT THANK YOU for new broken and ugly design and for broken flow.
- jerlev
Nimbostratus
What a mess! F5 should have done a better job with this transition. Why should users have to register again?!?! Not cool!
JurajCirrus
Frankly, I can't agree more with 's post. DevCentral used to be one of the best things about F5, because people could GOOGLE their question and get directly to the article/question/post discussed/answered here at DevCentral. The best support ever. Now, it's ruined. People are getting confused by a bunch of 404s, Google searches pointing to broken links. The most important condition of a successful DevCentral migration - old links still working - is broken. I have my browser bookmark manager full of broken DevCentral links. Every time I found something interesting on DevCentral, I bookmarked it. Twice, in my browser and under my DevCentral account as well. None of that is working now. Are you seriously considering this a successful migration?
About two weeks ago, I was presenting about F5 on one of the local conferences, and DevCentral was one of the things I was highly recommending to all the people new to F5. If I knew this was coming I wouldn't have done that.
- JRahm
@jerlev: I understand the frustration. However, for years members have been frustrated that they have to maintain multiple accounts to use the F5 services in each portal. DevCentral is the first to transition to a future reality of shared credentials. That requires a credential change.
@juraj: I completely understand the pain threshold everyone is experiencing. It takes time to index a site, but the search issue should resolve itself in the next week or so.
- John_Doe
,
- google search ruined
login to view content(now it's available without sign in)- bookmarks ruined
- right-click (open in a new tab) ruined
- a lot of white real estate space on left and right of article body (should one cw rotate display?)
- DC is on of SalesForce - additional sniffing and spying on DC visitors (with all that cross-analytics and stuff)
- compare 1.31MB page load and 2.71s load time vs 2.89MB and 7+s load time for https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:3Tv01A7pWEkJ:https://devcentral.f5.com/questions/apm-kcd-sso-requesting-ticket-cant-get-forwardable-tickets-1765328163-but-works-eventually-61972 and https://devcentral.f5.com/s/feed/0D51T00006i7jHySAI
- human readable URLs and page titles are gone
- "Show more" plague all over the site
- mobile layout ugly
- Search is too way "fancy" and dynamic
GDPR could be a reason for migration.
Jason, may I please have some questions?
- is that ok that F5 let third-party company (SF) to spy and gather analytics on F5's customers?
- having APM quite good for SSO, why is it problem to make seamless login with F5's hw/sw support?
- could it be possible to have fallback option and use old design and robust look and feel?
- It literally hampers to navigate - was there any UAT (user acceptance testing)?
- are there any options to make navigation less laggy (original website was much more responsive)?
Thank you.
p.s. at least it doesn't (sales-)force one to login to view content.
p.p.s. googlecache it the savoiur for now
MarkpBasically usable after the changes. Even the links in your own documentation is 404...
WS1One second after logging in I thought "where have I seen this ugly design before?" Cannot remember but it is the support site of one of our other vendors.
My firewall vendor hosts part of their support pages on salesforce, too and every now and then I get SSO errors from salesforce which won't go away for hours. Not good when you are trying to fix a problem. I really hate this, I hope this problem will not exist here.
What really drives me nuts every day is not being able to open links (i. e. search results) in new tabs . PLEASE fix this!
Paul_DawsonAll of the historical links on google are broken and when searching and following a like return a 404 from devcentral.
blackiytoI didn't get a 404, but I did get redirected to sign in.
