Redesigning CloudFlare | Hacker News Reader

Redesigning CloudFlare

blog.cloudflare.com

43 pointsjgrahamc10 comments

I joined the beta UI test in January, and even reported a bug regarding to handling of special characters, namely '<' and '>', in passwords submitted to CloudFlare. So now the new dashboard is finally rolled out to all users.

Several new features found (as a free-tier user) (maybe some of the following were previously pro features):

- More detailed analytics: Unique Visitors / Cached or Uncached Requests / Content Type Breakdown / Traffic Map / Top Visitor Origins / percentage of Traffic Served Over SSL

- HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) settings

- Authenticated Origin Pulls toggle

- Traffic Control / Keep track of firewall events for your site (by request id (Ray ID), IP address, etc.)

- Mobile Redirect / Redirect visitors that are using mobile devices to a mobile-optimized website

- a note field for each firewall access rule

My suggestions:

- Hide the li.slider-nav-prev and li.slider-nav-next as they are unnecessarily displayed on wide screens. Nothing happens when users click on them (until more 'tabs' are added).

- Update the 'Page Rules' tab to match the new design.

As a programmer I really appreciate these kinds of things as a rough howto and source of inspiration. It would've been cool if they showed how those roughs translated into finished UIs though!

I'm a big fan of CloudFlare, but there were some maddening regressions in usability with this redesign. My favorite so far is the newfound inability to append trailing dots when adding MX records -- this worked perfectly well before, but is now met with a rather unhelpful error message [1].

I'd really like to see a more widespread adoption of regression testing for UX, because CloudFlare is certainly not alone in this department.

1. "Invalid hostname: Use '@' to represent the root domain."

This nonsense drives me batty. Im guessing theyre importing this behavior from bind and godaddy. Its what many customers expect, regardless of how broken it is.

For a moment I thought it was going to be about them no-longer blocking Tor.

We've been progressively rolling out improvements to how shared IPs (like Tor exit nodes) get handled. It's basically a limitation of IP based reputation vs. more fine-grained reputation, and affects VPNs, NAT boxes, etc. the same way.

Or fixing underlying systems so they don't randomly go down in the middle of the day. Which seems to happen quite often. https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/history

I saw a lot of slowdowns (expected, and not major) while I tested out Cloudflare, but the worst part about the experience was the dropped requests that somehow got stuck between the users browser and my servers.

I tried to debug it, and gave a script to their engineers to reproduce, but we did not find a solution.

I thought it was going to be about removing or changing their misleading and confusing error pages.

I have a feeling it will look like digital ocean

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