linking open source tools in discord
Hello Cloudflare community team. I'd love to speak with a real live person about your guidelines around linking to open-source tools related to Cloudflare. I've built some tools that help manage config with specific integration for Cloudflare/wrangler that tries to make things easier.
There's not any specific info in the server guidelines, only a mention to share things you built in the #what-i-built channel. That channel makes sense if you are showing off a project you built using Cloudflare, but no one will go looking there for tools to help solve their config problems. I'm not posting links in random places, only on very specific threads where people are having related issues dealing with config.
I'm not sure if it was totally automated or not, but I've been warned several times against doing any "promotion" and my posts have been deleted, even after the person I was replying to reacted positively.
If I were selling something, I would understand, but this is a free open-source tool, and I'm trying to make tools that make it easier to build on Cloudflare. I would think you would want to encourage this kind of project.
Where do you draw the line? If I wrote out a bunch of custom code using the open source dotenv package, would that be ok? If someone was doing database-y things and I linked to a project like Prisma, would that get removed? Is there a certain number of github stars where it becomes mainstream enough to recommend without getting warned?
I love Cloudflare and I want to build more tools for the platform's users - but this is extremely discouraging.
2 Replies
As a heads up, I'm not a Cloudflare employee nor part of the community team, but wanted to offer my perspective.
In somewhere like a Discord community server, there's an expectation around open communication, collaboration, and folks providing thoughtful and helpful answers to other people's questions. Sometimes, that can absolutely result in folks building solutions, or sharing already existing solutions they're aware of, or even built themselves, to solve someone's problem. This is awesome, and so great to see!
However, there's a fine line between collaboration and constructive discussion, and self-promotion. Even if it's for a free/open-source solution, things like bumping month-old threads when someone's problem has already been solved, can be seen as advertising. My general recommendation when engaging in communities across the internet would be to keep any self-promotional messages to less than 10% of your total - even if it's for something free/open-source - and generally (outside of channels specifically intended for promotion) only share something if it's timely and relevant to the current and ongoing conversation. :MeowHeartCloudflare:
Thanks for the input and advice ❤️ Generally, I totally agree, although I do think there can be some value in bumping an old support thread, even if the problem has been marked solved - especially if the solution was an awkward workaround. Even if it may not help the original poster who likely moved on, search results means these old support threads end up being a community resource for others faced with similar issues. Providing additional (hopefully simpler) solutions, can be of great utility for future users.