Is there a CFML Slack URL that currently works for joining the Slack ? Seems Charlie's no longer works either

The "official" signup link is http://cfml-slack.net (and has been for ages). I don't know what URLs you are trying that don't work?

That's the url I point to in my blog post, also: https://www.carehart.org/blog/2023/2/6/new_url_for_cfml_slack_signup

Slack auto-expires the invite links after 400 people have signed up with it. So it does occasionally expire, but then I just update it at the domain name registrar (http://cfml-slack.net is always just a redirect to whatever the current active invite link).

Any chance of getting this running over HTTPS with a valid certificate ?

Nope.

not even via https://letsencrypt.org/ ?

I just tried it in the latest Firefox in Linux and it worked just fine.

if you've already whitelisted the domain it works

I've never visited that domain before in Firefox (because I only ever use Firefox for occasional tests of localhost apps -- I don't use FF in general).

of the few using firefox or on enterprise networks that "prefer" https, it can be a bit of a red flag seeing a http domain error

The domain is at namecheap and only exists as a redirect (to an HTTPS URL). I pay for it myself (even tho' I don't use CFML!) and, as far as I can tell, there's no option in namecheap to add SSL to a redirect URL for free.

Hey, Sean. It's of course awesome that you do that (and even that you're here replying immediately on this query from Gareth) . Thanks! As for hosting the domain, I'll note that cloudflare offers at-cost domains, including SSL (and in redirects). Just pointing that out if you want to explore it as an alternative. Again, the fact that you also handle changing the redirect to the new slack channel address is such a blessing to the community. If something about automating that won't work with cloudflare like it does with namecheap, it's certainly understandable if you'll opt not to change things. It seems a rare complaint that he's raised. Even so, good to have the discussion here in case others may benefit hearing it.

I've never dealt with CloudFlare but I use NameCheap for other domains -- including the auto-inviter for the Clojurians Slack community (which has about 30,000 members and hits the 400 limit on invite links about every other month). I only took this on because the Heroku free tier went away and no one was willing to spend money and take on the job of providing a way to self-signup. There had been no self-signup on-ramp for this Slack for quite a while before I bought the new domain at NameCheap -- but lots of people were happy to complain about the lack of it, without actually volunteering to do anything about it...

Right, so folks like us keep various things running long after we created them, often with little thanks. :-) Your comment might be read as a sideways suggestion that I could/should take it on. I could. I didn't offer because I don't know what the work would be that you do. If it's trivial or can be automated, great. Indeed, someone else in the community might/might have stepped up if they knew what the effort entailed. Lacking it, they likely shied away. I hope you appreciate that I'm speaking up here merely to help you both out. I never otherwise use slack myself. I got pinged on this thread as it mentioned me, so I stepped in. But I suspect few who might be typical candidates to take this on may necessarily see/read this thread. We could put out a call on the main channel. But again if it's simple enough work to take on I will, again with thanks for your years of handling it.

I wasn't thinking of you as a company -- you already do so much!

That's kind of you. But I do hope you may share what the effort would entail. I or others may step up. I see you're typing as I am.

There were several discussions about it in #cfml-general after the Heroku free tier went away. Of course, we can't search for those now, due to this whole Slack being on a free plan 😞

Don't forget the linen thing for search that we setup a couple years ago ...or has that gone the way of the dodo?

"All" that is needed is for someone to maintain a domain that redirects to a Slack invite link -- and anyone can create a Slack invite link and make it "never expire" (i.e., no time limit, only the 400 signups limit). So the work is updating the redirect any time the Slack invite link hits the limit and "expires", by creating a new invite link (and making sure to set it to "never expire"). Everyone here has permission to create and maintain their own invite link. The only upside for me of using my own link is that Slackbot sends me a message every time a new person signs up via the link -- so, as an Admin, I can track new members.

Cool. So how would someone running this know the limit was reached? Is that automatable?

Nope, there's the rub.

Since slack sends you a notification on each signup, can that perhaps be sent instead to something that counts it and triggers a notification in advance of reaching 400? Or have you tried and found it's somehow not possible?

Slack sends the notification directly in-app, via the Slackbot user, to the person who created the invite link that was used for each new member. So everyone who creates an invite link gets a message from Slackbot when their own invite link is used.

Wonderful to hear. Thx. Let's see how it goes.

NameCheap is so simple in its UI. CloudFlare is seriously "Enterprise" grade. I just shocked they do "free" plans at all. If we weren't already using them at work for some stuff, I would have been pretty overwhelmed by the UI 🙂

Yep, it's grown to become like aws or Azure in the ui's complexity--without even the simple search feature to easily find some setting. Some good news is that as for domain registration, once you're done, you're done. :-) They even automate renewals, with email notifications in advance. And the free level for their proxy/filtering/ddos service is quite good and also mostly "one and done" in terms of effort. :-)

@Gareth Okay, you should now have https://cfml-slack.net available and it should redirect you to sign in at Slack!

Just to say it, thank you both 🙂

Excellent work, @seancorfield and @carehart