Site Launch Frequently Asked Questions
Hey there, community. We are maintaining this FAQ as new issues come in that might be experienced by the community at large. This will be continually updated as we fix the discovered issues.
Login Issues
- I can't log in with my existing DevCentral credentials, how do I get logged in?
- Your existing credentials from the old site will not work. You need to create a new account with a valid email address.
- I am already a member of DevCentral. Why do I need to create a new account?
- For years the community has requested consolidated credentials across F5 web properties. DevCentral is the first site taking a step toward that reality, which requires a change in the credential setup.
- My password manager no longer works because the username and password are handled on separate pages, what can I do?
Profile Issues
- How do I get all my old content contributions back?
- Click on your profile and click edit, then scroll down toward the bottom of the page. You can merge in your old content by providing your old username and password and clicking merge account.
- I have merged my old account. Where are my favorites?
- The favorites were not ported over. You'll need to rebuild this.
Content Issues
- I am searching on Google for DevCentral content and every link is returning a 404 page. What's wrong?
- It will take Google some time to index the new site and update its content. This should resolve itself in a week or so.
- Where is all the /wiki content?
- The wiki did not journey onward with DevCentral. The API documentation from the wiki is now located at https://clouddocs.f5.com/api/. Other namespaces in the wiki were not retained, but select content from those areas will be released as articles in the near future. Comment below if there is anything in particular you need and we will prioritize it.
- You can download an offline copy of the wiki for personal access.
- Some links embedded in DevCentral content and most of my bookmarks are resulting in a 404 page. What's wrong?
- We have some limitations with redirects we’re working through. We prioritized the links most often visited. Other links are unlikely to work. Please search by title on DevCentral and you should find what you're looking for and can update your bookmarks. We will also be working on embedded links over time.
Site Issues
- Why is nothing redirecting? I hear you make a killer product that does this sort of thing?!?
- It's not true that nothing is redirecting, we just have some limitations with redirects and have prioritized the most popular destinations. If you end up on the 404 page, search for your content in the DevCentral search bar and you should find what you're looking for.
- We are aware of the power of BIG-IP iRules. We've written just a few here and there over the years. Our hosted solution makes using iRules not possible at this time.
- If you have the Tampermonkey browser extension, Michael Jenkins (former MVP) whipped up a couple scripts that will only redirect , or will rewrite on the page at document load and then redirect on click, all the API links that were formerly in the DevCentral wiki to their new home on Clouddocs.
- Why is the title font so blurry?
- There is a rendering condition on the font that needs to be addressed for some browser in some situations. For example, Safari and Firefox show this issue on my external monitor, but it looks fine on my retina screen, whereas with Chrome, it looks fine on both screens. Your mileage may vary.
Published May 17, 2019
Version 1.0
Chase_Abbott
Employee
EmployeeChase_AbbottEmployee
Employee
MarvinCirrocumulus
is it still possible to merge old articles/questions to my new Devcentral account?
- JRahm
Admin
blergh...so much for patterns! Ok, these have been cleaned up and verified, my apologies. I'll have another push tomorrow afternoon.
- Chase_Abbott
I just validated these links. We'll fix the cloudocs site asap.
https://cdn.f5.com/websites/devcentral.f5.com/downloads/icontrol-rest-user-11-5-0_24.pdf
https://cdn.f5.com/websites/devcentral.f5.com/downloads/icontrol-rest-user-11-6-0_15.pdf
FYI. v12 and up had "api" in the name. v11 didn't.
OrionNimbostratus
FYI, the iControl REST APi docs on https://clouddocs.f5.com (https://clouddocs.f5.com/api/icontrol-rest/) still has a few links pointing to CDN resources that are still very broken:
http://cdn.f5.com/websites/devcentral.f5.com/downloads/icontrol-rest-api-user-guide-11-5-0_24.pdf - 404
http://cdn.f5.com/websites/devcentral.f5.com/downloads/icontrol-rest-api-user-guide-11-6-0_15.pdf - 404
http://cdn.f5.com/websites/devcentral.f5.com/downloads/icontrol-rest-api-user-guide-13-1-0-a.pdf - 404
I found this when trying to grab the guide for 13.1.
- Chase_Abbott
Thanks for the info Sam. I'm going to see if I can setup a few tests VPN'ing out of our Aussie office (I'm already testing out of London). We have a few SaaS services that have potential to cause issue: GDPR/Cookie policy is an independent script/hosted service, Analytics is it's own animal, the search functionality on the site is a 3rd SaaS, and then the site itself. I'll test and respond back as soon as I can.
Sam_HallI'd be happy to send someone some screen captures to someone from f5, or if you have a good tool for measuring performance and want me to run some tests. To view this comment, the page took 25 seconds to load according to a page load timer browser extension. But then it was just a white screen with the logo for probably another 25 seconds after that for example. I'm really not exaggerating some of those load times I've mentioned above.
- Chase_Abbott
That is fantastic and measurable feedback I can push back on to our dev and SaaS teams with. This was a concern some of us had that was overlooked and I think we can make a better case to optimize script heavy functionality for smarter code. We'll update the community as we improve these failures. Lief Zimmerman has a recent update out already here and I'll discuss your performance issues with him immediately.
- Sam_Hall
I'm in Australia, clicking on a search result takes about 15-20 seconds for the content to load. So frustrating when it loads only to find it's not the content I'm looking for. Then I have to return to the search again, which takes at least 5+ seconds to load if I'm lucky. Search again for the same term I already searched for... wait another 10 seconds for the search results to load that I was looking at a moment ago, play lucky dip again based only on the title and a cropped sentence... wait 15-20 seconds... repeat... it all adds up. The fact is that information that would have taken maybe 30 seconds to locate on the old site, you could now expect to take about 5 minutes. I found I can get through faster if I open up about 10 tabs of the search page and paste my search term into all of them one by one, then return to each one to open all the results in parallel so I don't have to wait later. It's so lame.
If I actually have to login to do something, like make this comment, there goes at least another 30 seconds of my life with all the very slow redirection business going on there.
- Chase_Abbott
Hi Sam;
You're not along in your complaint regarding search. We have an open request in with our search SaaS to get HREF's active which will allow open-in-new-tab. Why that's not normal/expected is surprising to us as well. Regarding search speeds, what type of slowness are you seeing? We're doing site testing with speeds from Seattle, San Jose, and Chertsey UK. All speeds seem ok except when there's a script load delay (with search).
- Sam_Hall
The new site is very hard to browse and navigate. Search is slow and I can no longer open search results in a bunch of tabs in order to rapidly review and find the content I need.
For example, I only just found this FAQ today, and while it's content finally explains some things that have made me sad since the launch, you have to acknowledge the irony of having a FAQ that cant' be found. It's only had 108 views in a month since it was published.
