A brief history of the SNDevs community inviter page/site

A brief history of the SNDevs community invite page — from a Heroku app to a redirect, and what’s next.

v1 — The Heroku Auto-Inviter (2015-2019)

When the SNDevs Slack community started in November 2015, it went directly to an auto-invite link hosted in the cloud.

Original Reddit post

The original invite page for SNDevs was hosted at snowslack.herokuapp.com. The earliest Internet Archive capture shows the original version from November 13, 2015.

It was a simple slackin-style app — a single page with an email field and a “Join” button. You entered your email, the Heroku app called the Slack API, and you got an invite. The page header used the branding “ServiceNow Developers” (the name “SNDevs” came later in common usage).

JarodM Note: I have a copy of the NodeJS site somewhere and will open source the repo in a future update.

v2 — The Redirect (2019–2026)

Slack changed their invite method strategy and deprecated the API endpoint that powered auto-invite apps. By late 2019, invite.sndevs.com was created and switched to a HTTP 302 redirect to whatever the current Slack shared invite URL is. Each invite link expired after 400 uses, so every few months the redirect target needs to be rotated.

v3 — The Cloudflare Invite Gate (2026)

The v2 redirect had extremely low friction — anyone (or anything) with the link got straight into the workspace. As the community grew past 30,000 members, spam accounts and AI bots became a real problem. v3 replaces the open redirect with a gated invite flow built entirely on Cloudflare.

The stack: a Cloudflare Worker serves a branded form at invite.sndevs.com/, backed by Cloudflare KV for token storage and rate limiting, Cloudflare Turnstile for bot detection, and Cloudflare Email Service for verification emails.

The flow:

  1. User lands on the form and enters their email
  2. Turnstile verifies they’re human
  3. The worker checks the email against a blocklist of disposable email domains and enforces IP-based rate limiting
  4. A one-time verification link is emailed, valid for 24 hours
  5. Clicking the link consumes the token and redirects to the Slack shared invite URL

The entire thing runs on Cloudflare with no external dependencies.

Update from June 2026: The number of new spam bots has gone thru the floor. Seems to be a great success.