I know the intentions here are good, but it’s not the way open source works. Sure, it would be nice to have an example of this in the docs, but the author has no obligation to it. We get to use Cowboy for free and we build on top of it, thanks to the author’s (and contributors’) work. It’s absolutely ok to propose features and ask for support of course, but it’s also perfectly ok for the maintainer to decline the feature or to not be able/willing to provide support.
I don’t want to sound harsh, I just think we are all getting so much from open source, and maintaining a popular open source project is often thankless work. We cannot expect the maintainer to be the only source of support and information, we need to be willing to do our part.
