Deprecating public event webhooks

Particle Updates
1

Hi there Particle Community!

We wanted to share an update around changes to webhooks that trigger on other users’ public events. As of tomorrow (Tuesday, August 2), the following changes will occur:

  1. New webhooks may now only target your own event stream (events triggered by your devices), and not the public event stream (events triggered by other people’s devices).
  2. Existing webhooks that target the public event stream will be migrated to target your own events.

To be super clear, this change only applies to webhooks triggering on the public event stream, and not any existing private events. If a webhook was created by the same user, customer, or product that is publishing the events, you will see no impact from this change.

Furthermore, Particle.publish and Particle.subscribe behavior is not impacted!

Why is Particle making this change?

  • Our main goal is to help product creators and developers maintain a high level of security for their devices and products
  • Currently, if you create a webhook, it defaults to triggering on public events, but we found that most people were unaware of this default, and invariably revert their webhooks to trigger on private events
  • This means that intentional usage of the public event stream has been extremely low!
  • Furthermore, the public ‘firehose’ of events has grown over the years and could easily overwhelm most targeted servers!

Based on this broad trend, and because public communications are not recommended for products, we feel that it’s prudent to migrate all remaining webhooks in this category to target your own event stream.

If this applies to any webhooks you’ve set up, you’ll see them migrate to target your own event stream tomorrow (August 2), but otherwise, you’ll see no impact.

We’re working hard to make the Particle the best platform for your IoT devices and products and we think this will be a valuable improvement. If you have any questions or comments we’re eager to hear from you!

Thanks!

Jon and the Particle team

5 Likes
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I use web books in my project. And availability is important to me.

I wanted to say congratulations on the successful migration of August 2. My servers never heard you miss a beat. Thanks, and congratulations.
– Mike

4

@Horganic, do you actually need public webhooks that can be triggered by any device of any other user in the world?

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No I do not. I think even the most public of public event streams would still want to reserve access to their stream just in case.

I appear to fall directly into your target group for these deprecations. My event stream is intended to be private but I haven’t gone back to fix the default use of public because there’s no sensitive information transmitted.

–mike