Perhaps it is time to think about alternatives

[jdaviescoates]

@luckow said in Perhaps it is time to think about alternatives:

Each ending starts with a free edition.

What do you mean by this?

I think you mean, often when a company start pointing out you're on the "free edition" it's often the beginning of the end, in that they'll likely hollow out the free edition and keep pushing the paid edition until the free edition isn't worth having?

@luckow said in Perhaps it is time to think about alternatives:

What is your feeling about this?

It is sad that RC seem well on their way along the ever-less-open-source-ever-more-corporate trajectory.

@robi said in Perhaps it is time to think about alternatives:

I'd find the asset and remove it.

Adding this
.rcx-box.rcx-box--full.rcx-css-qp1u3x { display: none; }

In the Custom CSS section of /admin/settings/Layout seem to do the trick.

[tjtjtj]

Yeah I've noticed they've been scaling back on features for some time. They really put the nail in the coffin for me when they deprecated the use of markdown in channels. Now there's very little options to customize channel layouts.

[subven]

I really learned to hate rocket chat. Back then I was evaluating chat software and rocket chat looked very good on paper. It then turned out that the Free/Community edition doesn't support ACL or customizable user permissions although you can set them in the config. That was not documented at that time....as an example...anyone who joined a channel was able to invite anyone, delete messages or the channel itself. Rocket chat was therefore almost impossible to use sustainably.

We've been using Matrix and Element ever since, thanks to Cloudron's great work in providing us with a working solution.

[girish]

@subven Do you mean mattermost (instead of rocket.chat) ? IIRC, mattermost had those limitations.

[subven]

@girish yeah Mattermost had the same "issues" but worse.

Not up to date what it looks right now regarding rocket chat but at least the homepage lists user permissions as enterprise feature.

[doodlemania2]

@subven FWIW, you can put Mattermost into dev mode and it removes all that enterprise gimic gunk.

[fbartels]

@doodlemania2 said in Perhaps it is time to think about alternatives:

put Mattermost into dev mode and it removes all that enterprise gimic gunk

A quick google search did not give any further insights to this, how can you enable this? That sounds like quite some self sabotage on their side.

[marcusquinn]

@luckow We transitioned 107 users away from Rocket Chat and onto Nextcloud Talk (they already had Nextcloud Files access with Cloudron LDAP).

Haven't looked back since — best move we made, and highly recommended.

The prompt for reviewing alternatives to move to came when they started restricting LDAP usage and sync capabilities:

• https://forum.cloudron.io/topic/5605/after-the-next-release-4-0-ldap-saml-and-custom-oauth-will-be-available-only-in-enterprise-edition-and-gold-plan
• https://forum.cloudron.io/topic/5901/where-s-the-rocket-chat-ldap-sync-button-gone

Anecdotally, users all seem to prefer the Nextcloud Talk mobile apps for its simplicity, the integrated calling quality and attachments saved in files. I don't miss the desktop app, as it's easy enough to make a webapp with Vivaldi or Nativefier.

[doodlemania2]

@fbartels it's for developers and "not recommended for production" but an example of how one might do that can be found here: https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-plugin-playbooks#license
Not advocating at all for not following the license terms, just something I observed when testing Playbooks for my own use case to avoid the constant nag.

[Sam_uk]

@doodlemania2 Gah I'm sick of Rocketchat.

It keeps hanging at the moment (since 11 day ago update) Anyone else finding this?

[girish]

@Sam_uk As in, you have to refresh the browser to see the message going through ? If so, yeah, we see the same behavior at times. Quite buggy this current release.

[marcusquinn]

@girish That issue seems to have been around for many versions. To compare; not having those issues with Nextcloud Talk.

Only thing I can think Rocket Chat might be good for now, having made the switch, is the website chat widget. Although, there's better specialist apps for that on the Wishlist too.

[micmc]

@marcusquinn said in Perhaps it is time to think about alternatives:

... Rocket Chat might be good for now ... is the website chat widget. ...

Which can also be easily implemented with Chatwoot if only a chat widget is required.

[subven]

@micmc or Freescout + Chat Module...already on Cloudron ^^

[girish]

@marcusquinn We are switching slowly to Element, will update on how it goes It's a bit complicated having to many of our customers as well.

[marcusquinn]

@girish Nice, last time I looked it felt a bit clunky, but it sounds like they have a commitment to develop, so will have another look at it again too. Saying that, I'm finding Nextcloud Talk just zero effort for onboarding as everyone was already on Nextcloud Files, and seems to like that enough for it to not feel like extra effort for them to use another part of it.

[micmc]

@marcusquinn I see all the praise about NextCloud Talk, however at some point I'd been testing it however, it seems to work pretty well for live one on one talk, but in the other hand, I find very much annoying the constant notifications of every action and move being added to the chat thread, which renders it very difficult to follow the text chat as it is normally. Have I missed something? Or is there a way to cut that?

[marcusquinn]

@micmc Notifications settings at /settings/user/notifications might offer the options you need?

[Sam_uk]

@nebulon Is there an easy way to go back to an older version without losing recent chats?

I can restore from backup, but I assume I lose recent chat history then?

[nebulon]

@Sam_uk there is no easy way, as often with updates the database schema changes and thus code and data become incompatible.