You use software that others create and make available to you free of charge. You get everything. Code, docs.
How do you come to the expectation that everyone MUST be helped here?
Where do you see your right to get help?
If you have almost no knowledge of Linux and the necessary areas and are not willing to take the time to familiarize yourself (the hours are important for the learning curve), I recommend booking a managed cloud for 5 bucks a month. Professionals will then take care of the management and you can use the cloud without any worries.
As other moderators have already written, we are volunteers and if vacation, illness or other important things come up, the forum is left out.
A small group (a handful of people) is constantly working on the forum structures and discussing improvements.
We have to expect a user to take 10 minutes to fill out a template with a good description of the problem.
Otherwise, the recurring question-and-answer game begins.
If my answer is too harsh for you, change your perspective and imagine that you have been investing time here since 2016 and then such expectations are formulated.
a lot of data isnāt within Nextcloud Server but in the surrounding infrastructure (web server and reverse proxy; not to mention the web browser console, client installations, etc.).
the script has to be independent of Nextcloud Server since by definition the Server installation may be offline/not functioning properly (so a Nextcloud app is of limited use)
And none of these questions on the support template can be answered by a script:
Is this the first time youāve seen this error? (Yes / No):
When did this problem seem to first start?
Installation method (e.g. AIO, NCP, Bare Metal/Archive, etc.)
Are you using Cloudflare, mod_security, or similar? (Yes / No)
Summary of the issue you are facing:
[ā¦]
Steps to replicate it (hint: details matter!):
[ā¦]
Log entries:
Nextcloud Log - Please provide the log entries from your Nextcloud log that are generated during the time of problem
Web Browser Log
Web server/reverse proxy Log
Thatās most of the template.
Additionally, the support template itself is a useful troubleshooting tool in itself:
if one wants to try to troubleshoot a problem in their environment, the template asks for the things that need to be looked at by someone troubleshooting (such as the person posting themselves)
if the poster (admin of an installation) isnāt able to to readily figure out how to check their various logs, itās not surprising they havenāt solved the problem on their own. And itās probable that learning that is a good starting point[1] since itās unavoidable even if theyāre seeking assistance from others to analyze the logs (particularly initially).
Also letās be real here: Nextcloud Server is not a consumer app. Itās an enterprise app. Thereās always going to be a fair degree of technical knowledge and local deployment environment knowledge expected of the operator.
Not saying theyāre canāt be some incremental improvements, but Iām not sold.
Donāt get me wrong: Iām not discouraging experimentation and brainstorming. Iām just trying to point out that there are people around that have put thought into a lot of this. And the above are some of the challenges Iāve noted in my own journey down this path.
Footnotes:
[1] This itself might suggest a compelling reason to add links to specific key bits of documentation in the forum main menu header. Basically quick links in the header for 2-5 of the most essential troubleshooting/day-to-day admin processes. Ideas:
@ernolf@rakekniven and others have already said everything there is to sayā¦ So just a silly car comparison from me this time
As some of you may know, Iām not really keen on posts like this, because in my opinion itās just another relatively unspecific rant to express general dissatisfaction after realising that the cool and hip product you can get for free requires work to actually use it. Of course you can always criticise specific points, preferably with concrete suggestions for solutions, but to demand them in such a general, unspecific way is at best unproductive and entitled and at worst unfriendly and entitled. The tone of this one is still in the ok-ish range for me, so unproductive and entitled it is then.
Itās a bit like being given a million-dollar luxury brand hypercar (yes, the comparison is flawed, car comparisons are always flawed ) and then demanding that the person or company that gifted it to you also pays for parking, insurance and petrol because you canāt actually afford to use the car, and while theyāre at it they should also offer you driving safety course because youāre overwhelmed by the handling of the 1000 horsepower car. Oh, and they should also pay for any damage you cause with the vehicle, because why are they giving away such a death machine, right!? I mean itās way too fast and difficult to drive for an average driverā¦
The question we should be asking ourselves is: How can we help immature people to take responsibility for themselves? Because that is the goal of free software. Nextcloud is obliged to make its code public because it is based on the open source code of OwnCloud. So it is not only a gift, but also an obligation to make the parts of its software available that are based on open code. I donāt know how many other functions have been incorporated into Nextcloud. But every further development and disclosure is a success for humanity.
I have often relied on this forum, whenever I needed help, and for the most part, I have recieved it. If it wasnāt for the good people here, I would not be running a self hosted, bare metal Nextcloud server today.
But you need to do your homework.
Try and solve the issue first, before asking other people for help.
Use the posting template to fill out information, so people can look at it, right away. They should not ask you for things you could have provided up front.
Learn about the technology, so you can apply correct formating in the first place. Go back to some of your earlier posts and you know what Iām talking about.
And do keep a diary of everything you do to the server, including the commands you issued. This will make it easier to identify problems and correct them on your own. And if you canāt sovle things, itāll be much easier to describe to others, what you did or didnāt do.
What is the consequence of this topic, what can be improved?
Howto section already covers frequently arising questions e.g. moving data folder, reverse proxies, trusted domains, update php, ā¦
Do you miss topics?
More links to existing topics (e.g. within the official documentation)?
Investing time in creating a well-written how-to guide is worthwhile, as it helps prevent recurring questions from consuming everyoneās time
Official documentation:
Some points that would have been great to have known before? (pitfalls for beginners are not obvious for developers)
Completely missing points? Better structure?
For these improvements, you do not have to be either developer nor a very experienced user. There might be people out there knowing how to write up such topics nicely, and if some background is unclear, others can help out with that.
Iām from 81, but uncle(Uncle worked for Cap-Gemini) and dad had a computer pretty early on. We had a Headstart 386 with 1.44" and 3.25" drives no HDD yet. Remember playing Larry :P, digger and some other stuff, by age 10 or so i had my own PC.
And yes dialupā¦ 4800/9600baud, later 33K6 and 56Kā¦ pfff the phone bills i racket up. And yeah BBS, IRC also completely forgot about that. I was lucky though. My first own screen was a 15" SVGA :). A few years later i got myself a 19" nec multisync 1600x1200 with BNC to DSUB15 cablesā¦ OMG was that heavy not to mention hugeā¦ Sometime later i got 2 and desk got to small.
If iām honest those days it felt special to have stuff, it was way harder to configurate a system, motherboard jumpers had to be set right, mp/voltages/fsb. Learning it was āeasierā also since you couldnāt really look anything up so figuring stuff out was the way to go.
you got more than enough attention from the most active and experienced people hereā¦
many posters in this thread do really a lot in this forum contributing since years (myself since 2020, other even longer). What did you do to support newbies in this forum? go onā¦ answer the questions and write postsā¦ Iāll be happy to review if you ask. Let me know you want advice on demanded newbies topics.
I help people wherever I can. If I can help here and have solved problems myself over time, I will be happy to help others as well. For me, this is a form of gratitude that I was also helped. In other Linux communities I am also actively helping. Itās good that AIO users who have the same questions as me can read in my topics.
Because even if everyone here says the documentation or the how tos describe everything exactly what you need for self-help. If I did not find a clear or detailed answer to my questions, I was unsure whether my assumptions were correct. Only after that did I ask for help here. If I ask something, itās because I canāt get any further myself. And not because I want to make it particularly easy for myself and donāt want to put any work into my project. I think thatās how many feel. Especially newcomers. Who simply still have too little understanding of the software. I can only recommend the AIO for newcomers. Everything runs smoothly for me. And I would have been overwhelmed with building it from scratch myself.
It may be that a large part of the active users here are much more familiar with things. And thus evaluate beginners by their level. I donāt know why you could blame someone if they are imperfect and new to a topic. Only by taking them by the hand can such people really get ahead. At the very least, the process can be accelerated, which is beneficial to the common good.
And all the people who help others here unselfishly show that they are beings with high ethical values. Who are not above explaining something. I didnāt create this thread here to cause discord. But because I found similar questions to the one I had, which no one has answered for years. Which seemed to me as if I didnāt get an answer to such small insignificant problems that were easy to solve. I am not attacking anyone here under any circumstances. On the contrary, I will continue to be dependent on help in the future because I cannot afford premium support.
Long term Nextcloud user here (since v13). Forum has been useful to me most of the time. At times I had to find the answers somewhere else which is fine as it goes deep into other applications sometimes. For me it has been quite a journey to get where I am now for sure and multiple hours and days went into it. Learnt a lot so I accept that.
The functionality of Nextcloud is good imo, but upload/download performance (3Mb/s on 12-core processor with 32Gb+, SSD/NVME drives,fast network, almost idling all the time)) is still an insurmountable topic for me mostly due to the numerous settings and parameters required for that. It also ever appears to be changing when major updates come through of one of the components, throughput performance used to be a lot better some time ago.
Anyway, always room for improvement including the forum. My advise would be to setup a (AI) Nextcloud specific chatbox for most of the beginners questions and feed that with the top 100 most common questions and mistakes and include references to relevant documentation. Finding stuff is the hardest part imo. That would clear up a lot of volunteer Q&A time to tackle real bugs or more complex issues.
Adding my two cents here.
As the Nextcloud App store has become a bit of a wasteland, I am currently stuck in an older version of NC. Upgrading isnāt an option or I will loose many functionnalities my users rely on.
NC 28 pretty much broke every single apps that wasnāt actively maintained, and some would require heavy dev to be compatible, so in most case not happening.
So the forum gets frustrating because NC is a complex software that can be installed and used in many different ways.
If I have any advice to beginners: Allways use the most streamlined method to do things and donāt ever use free third party apps.
NC is a fantastic cloud storage system, but donāt get cocky because initial installation was easy and try to make it do anything exotic.
I think there are already enough people in the world that ask questions, and often itās the only thing they do unfortunately. Nextcloud and the community around it on the other hand does take action, by actively creating things.
There may be some nuances with different (F)OSS licences, but in general, (F)OSS does not mean that products based on (F)OSS have to be āfree as beerā, and there is no (F)OSS licence that says you have to provide forums and documentation, or ready-made, easy-to-use appliances like AIO, and so on.
And it certainly does not mean that anyone is obliged to take the time to help you deploy and run the products on the infrastructure of your choice for free, be it the company, the community or anyone else.
They could very well just release a paid product, or no finished product at all, and on request tell you, hereās the source code, help yourself.
Are you a politician? If not, you should consider starting a political careerā¦
Iām not sure thereās too much to improve in the forum, and if so certainly not based on this post. I mean itās a community forum that lives from its members, and thereās no guarantee of help or answers, and in this specific case Iād say that OPās frustration is 99% caused by expectations that canāt possibly be met by any community forum.
These links almost completely disprove the initial post. If they prove anything, it would be the exact opposite from what was claimed in the initial post. So you might as well ask: What the hell is this person talking about!?
So if no contructive content will be added the topic will be closed tomorrow.
I will not spend more time reading and writing here and help other users instead.
Someone asks where they can find the config. There are hints as to where it might beā¦ but he doesnāt even bother to search for it in the forum.
Then, much later, there is a dedicated link to a page describing where to find the configuration script in questionā¦ And in the direct reply to this, the user in question then asks again where the config is and complains that he canāt get any help here. And that everything is bad here anyway.
A few, Iāll call them āvicarious agentsā then come up with their views on why it has always been bad and why everything is only getting worse and worse anyway.
One of them even gets carried away with the idea that everything is not only bad here, but also on Github.
In between, almost desperate postings from people who really spend a lot of time here and help, help, help. And calls for order that fizzle out.
This kind of thing is deeply demotivating for me and I always like to withdraw for a while and let the forum be a forumā¦ after all, there are other ways to waste my time.
Gratitude? Itās rareā¦ which means you have to have a pretty thick skin here and sometimes go through real pain to try and help users.
You can factor this into your daily pain, knowing that this forum helps ppl directly and it counts in 10s if not 100s of thousands. We (speaking of this forum) are successful!
But when some super-brains come along and think they have to reinvent the wheel just because they are too lazy (!) or incapable (!) or unwilling (!) to carry out the simplest searches themselves and instead spend hours writing complicated answers as to why they are saving the world with their reinvention of the wheel and everyone else has no idea, thatās just going too far.
At some point you have to realize: OK, someone is bored and obviously needs attention.
Anyways: I think everything has been said on this subject. Everyone is allowed to have their own opinion, thatās their right. Keep it!
And if they think that this forum doesnāt meet their needs, they are welcome to visit other forums, buy professional support (there are also small providers offering help for small business users etc, I can make some contacts directly and donāt even get a cent commission - PM me), book a managed Nextcloud or whatever, if thatās what they think, then they should go ahead and do that.
And at least stop stealing other peopleās time even more.
Absolutely, seeking more information about the platform is what brings all of us here.
If youāve had the same result 3 times, perhaps it is time to consider what can you do differently as part of your update process.
In that case, you need to let it go. Best bet is to get some else to manage it for you. Hope you find a solution that works.
I would hope the community would put more focus towards whatever does actually help, be it contributing documentation or testing things & providing logs, etc.
This might be easier if it becomes clearer of where users should contribute to their particular brand/iteration/part of Nextcloud.
In that case, arenāt you simply responding with a template clarifying what that person should do next?
I suppose this is not already clear enough within the forumā¦ how someone can properly search it, github & the web to help themselves + their post.
Yes, which is reflected in all the responses.
Something of this nature would be great if it helped users post either here or in the appropriate github repo from within their Nextcloud.
fwiw, you should not be editing within docker containers. More of an aside, but that should not be a thing. There must be a more elegant solution, be it env variables or something else.
Yes, it is an optional community alternative to paid support. Yes, it is run by passionate helpers to spread free software and help users. Yes, it is because the company commercializes support because the product is totally free. Yes, the company leaves users to support themselves when they choose to not only use, but run the software themselves.
Think of it this way: if I give you a pair of drumsticks, do I owe you drum lessons? Or drums? Or a band? Or a place to promote yourself? Does the music store or manufacturer? Being permissive and open is awesome, but it is a lonely journey as well to learn and maintain.
Exactly.
It makes me wonder what we can actually contribute to improve things. Complaining is a step, but certainly not the end goal if we are planning to continue trying to figure this platform out.
Interesting to hear a different perspective from someone who finds the support template useful.
million percent. This might as well be stickied to the forum.
Are these steps you mention not clear enough within the forum?
But is it clear enough where more contributions are needed / helpful?
Does this mean you feel personally obligated to begin contributing documentation or code to improve help for others? Taking responsibility yourself sounds like a great contribution to the project and community of others finding themselves in the same situation as yourself. I hope you do it!
Yes, I had this thought tooā¦ we (I work for Discourse) do this at ask.discourse.com, which is trained on our support forum discussions at meta.discourse.org.
It works quite well. However, meta.discourse.org is also where we keep our documentation and we have been fairly ruthless at gardening discussions over the years, and we actively monitor the answers AI provides to make sure the answers are correct.
I donāt recommend we use Discourse AI here because the best public documentation is actually not on the forum itself but at docs.nextcloud.com.
million percent. This might as well be stickied to the forum.
Taking responsibility yourself sounds like a great contribution to the project and community of others finding themselves in the same situation as yourself. I hope you do it!