In two years, people will still be saying "nginx + ssl = bad" because of this post even though the problem may well be fully addressed. Google will continue to surface this article even though it may be totally wrong at some future date. That sucks.

If it was really that easy to spread this questionable message for years, it would be as easy to spread other articles as well.

So it wouldn't need more than a few articles, like "nginx + ssl = works like a charm", or "nginx has better SSL support than Apache". It would not matter whether those were actually correct, just a single article of questionable quality would be sufficient.

... and here it is:

"nginx does not suck at ssl"

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2759596

Why not doing both? First a small article about the surprising phenomenon, which announces a more thorough analysis next week.

That way, it is possible to get some initial feedback and maybe even some good hints that help speeding up the analysis. In the best case, the announced analysis could become a collaboration by multiple authors.

As Randy says: "The best way to get tech support online isn't to ask for help -- just visit a chat room and declare 'Linux sucks! It can't do X!'"

That reminds me of the old trick of asking a reasonable question. Then getting a friend to give a wrong answer to that. The real answer is likely to be somewhere in the flood of corrections that you see.

If the config files had been posted, the reader could work out the issues on their own and everybody benefits.

I agree. What if we all waited until 2008 for an academic to publish a 30 page paper about Ruby and Python and how they can be useful for building web apps?