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Comment by laumars | Hacker News Reader

That's clearly not always the case otherwise we wouldn't be having this conversation to begin with.

Also I'm not suggesting you make it front and centre but as it is currently there's only one mention on your landing page and it's buried so far deep it might as well not be mentioned at all. I did also look through some of the other docs and still missed it. If I missed it you can bet others have too. All I'm suggesting is that it's worth being a little more explicit about that because that will be a key detail for some people.

You mention about it being written in Go. That seems less relevant (in my personal opinion) but that's a great place to add a line saying something like

"Caddy uses the ACME protocol to automatically manage secure certificates issued by Let's Encrypt."

View on HN

Caddy works with more than just Let's Encrypt though, and we'd like to avoid encouraging a monoculture of automated CAs (as much as I love Let's Encrypt).

> That's clearly not always the case otherwise we wouldn't be having this conversation to begin with.

Well, sometimes we forget that HN is not actually the center of all new tech. ;) This discussion is a bit of an exception. Most of our leads don't come from HN.

But I will see what we can do to make that more obvious once we're out of beta.

> Caddy works with more than just Let's Encrypt though, and we'd like to avoid encouraging a monoculture of automated CAs (as much as I love Let's Encrypt).

Which is good but now we're back to my original question: "What CA's does Caddy support?"

It shouldn't be that hard of a question to find the answer to but it seems even you can't give me a straight answer and that's really off putting.

> Well, sometimes we forget that HN is not actually the center of all new tech. ;) This discussion is a bit of an exception. Most of our leads don't come from HN.

You were the one who posted the link! If the landing page isn't designed for HN audiences then maybe that's not the link you should have posted on HN?

I know it's hard taking what seams like criticisms when it's your own projects (I maintain popular open source projects too so have experienced this first hand many times myself) but sometimes it pays not to default on the defensive. I'm not saying you have to listen to nor agree with all feedback given -- and obviously I don't expect you to entertain people who are just rude or demanding -- but it's an order of magnitude harder for people to raise legitimate constructive comments or genuine questions / concerns if they're back-footed.

> "What CA's does Caddy support?"

From the site: "Any ACME-compatible CA can be used." Relevant config parameter: https://caddyserver.com/docs/json/apps/tls/automation/polici...

> It shouldn't be that hard of a question to find the answer to but it seems even you can't give me a straight answer and that's really off putting.

Um, my bad? I said I would try to improve this when I have time.

> You were the one who posted the link!

And the HN commenters proceed to think they are the central source of a project's vitality and popularity. I can post the link, but that is not where most of Caddy's traffic comes from. A bit self-aggrandizing of the HN crowd to assume that their opinion is the one true way; but this is true of most mob mentalities.

> but sometimes it pays not to default on the defensive.

Ah, so you think I'm being defensive... I see... I guess it is hard these days to have a discussion of facts and ideas without thinking about it in terms of attack/defense.

Anyway... I admit, I digress into lamenting the state of the HN community, which is off-topic.

> You were the one who posted the link! If the landing page isn't designed for HN audiences then maybe that's not the link you should have posted on HN?

The logical extreme of this statement is that @mholt shouldn't post a link to any website unless that link is specifically tailored to the average reader of the site he's posting to. That, or Hacker News is special among all websites @mholt could post to.

I don't think that's fair. I also don't see the defensiveness you see - instead, I see @mholt explaining his website's strategy for the benefit of your understanding (as well as that of any future readers). The alternative to which would be not responding to your feedback at all, as he already has sound reasoning not to incorporate your specific suggestion (which we know because he explained it).

It's important to read into the best possible interpretation of a comment and respond to that, assuming good faith, especially on communities like this one. Otherwise we begin to assume everyone is attacking or defending.

I wasn’t just basing my comment off his responses to me, his tone was similar through this thread and on the Github issue tracker as well (I later saw others have commented on it too). But it’s possible that’s just his writing style and we are reading too much into it and if that’s the case then I’m sorry for doing so.

Regarding the link point. I don’t agree. If you purposely post a promotional link saying “use my tool” to a specific forum then you can’t really backtrack and say “you’re not my intended audience for this page” when people raise questions based on incomplete information published to that link. That’s just bad product advertising. Or at the very least, you should add a disclaimer saying “this is normally a manager link (etc)”.

As it happens, I am actually the target audience for that landing page because I am a tech lead responsible for making architecture-based decisions and the number of HTTP end points we have is few because that’s not the main side of our business (so certs often get forgotten about). That’s why I was asking the questions I was asking.

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