At a high level, I have a few expert-level questions and need some help troubleshooting some problems that while not unique, are absolutely nothing I can find any related results just by searching.
Adding to the frustration are the following:
* Google's search results are so completely useless these days it makes me angry. It seems that no matter what magic spell of keyword combinations I try, all of the top level results are either completely unrelated to what I search for or are otherwise just populated by SEO related spam that is mostly just nginx's commercial vomit.
* Serverfault.com looks dead. I asked something there in late April and to date its had 28 views and no comments or answers.
* Asking on general Stackoverflow gets your question closed because its not programming related. (I agree with that policy. Just saying its not and shouldn't be a valid avenue for help with this topic.)
* https://www.reddit.com/r/nginx/ is mostly a dead community.
* https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/ is really active, but generally not a good place to ask for nginx.
* I don't think there is a Discord community channel for nginx. I searched a bit the other day for this and couldn't find one.
* I've resorted to ChatGPT and it at least acts like it understands my questions, and it is somewhat helpful sometimes, but most of the time the answers it gives are not actually accurate enough to help. But a couple of times it has pointed me towards the right direction.
Although I've worked as a software engineer for years here in SF, only a couple of my friends are even in the field and none of them have experience that would help.
I've recognized that I'm probably at least shoulder deep into this particular rabbit hole and its time to ask for some help to pull my head out and show me other resources I'm not aware of.
Appreciate everyone's help.
Another resource that I like is the Nginx subreddit (r/nginx). It’s a friendly and active community where you can post your questions, problems, tips, and feedback. You can also learn from other people’s experiences and solutions.
If you’re looking for more specific or advanced help, you might want to check out some of the online courses or books on Nginx. I’ve heard good things about Nginx Fundamentals by Ray Viljoen and Mastering Nginx by Dimitri Aivaliotis. They cover a lot of topics from installation and configuration to optimization and security.
Hope this helps!
Fortunately there is a way to get more accurate results than what you currently get with this option being turned off by default: Click on the Tools button and change from All Results to Verbatim; now you should get better results than before; it's not a panacea, but still it's better than what you get by default I'm afraid.
Post it to HN, get traction.
Get way more help and responses than you can shake a stick at, and track where they come from.
Can you share the specific problem?
Also learning the internals or playing with OpenResty will help.
With all the hype of people saying they were using it for dev, I wanted it to give me a valid NGINX config that included specific URL rewrites. I gave it the original Apache .htaccess file, the documentation, and the URL rewrites it would require.
Despite endlessly correcting it, trying many, many, many different prompts, I still couldn't get it to stop hallucinating. That's what LLMs do.
Eventually I just did it myself, took 2 minutes. I can only conclude that most people's Dunning-Kruger complex prevents them from knowing when the LLM is wrong. I will say that every config file it output looked convincing with a cursory glance, but they were generally non-functional and full of hallucinations.
In terms of communities, can't help you there, sorry. It's oddly niche.