As a small corporate user I’ve now been using and managed a Nextcloud installation for a couple of months. We are now moving our staff over to nextcloud in order to stop using many external services, ie. onedrive, gmail, office365, skype and more. One thing however has become a near showstopper for our team, the very poor Talk alert / notifications.
I thought about making this a ticket/issue in Issues · nextcloud/spreed · GitHub but I can see there are already a lot there, some from years ago. I’ve raised this before and it was suggested its all fine and that I should inspect the browser notifications settings and/or available plugins. I’ve done all that and feel quite certain that anyone who feels the current status of notification handling is adequate isn’t actually using it beyond basic testing. We’ve been using it for over a month and every single person is at their wits end with a great deal of lost time waiting for someone to respond when that person has no idea of the message or that anyone is waiting. It is such a shame, we can overlook that its a little sluggish but poor notification is simply a business use case killer. We’ve tried to discontinue using Slack and Skype but continually find we are forced to use them in order to get someone’s attention.
I’m aware of the integration options of rocket.chat and that might be a possible workaround, but implementing rocket.chat for a small team of users simply because of poor Talk notification is sad. As you would expect Talks nextcloud integration is far superior than any other communication product so we desperately want to use it, but its looking like we can’t for anything needing constant/instant communication.
I’ve tried installing the Android Talk app, while a poor workaround this can help a little as long as you don’t have a browser tab open on Talk, otherwise you won’t get push alerts to your phone. There is a reason that platforms like slack and rocket.chat don’t rely on browser/OS alerts!
We need audible + visually and continual alerts. Please go over the top with alert options, flash the browser tab, scream non-stop, then just provide options to en/disable that for anyone who doesn’t need it.
Please Nextcould, such a first class product with a seriously short coming (at least for us)
File the tickets on github and link them back to the forum. That is the way features and issues are addressed in the project. There are no guarantees, so our best option is to follow the process requested by the nextcloud devs.
Rather than create a new I’ll list of open ones that a closely related: #4651, #3388, #1444, #15755 and a bonus one for a desktop app #1100 because that would be cool.
I think I’ve already been quite verbose and pretty clear but happy to expand if anything is unclear. Each ticket sighted are slight variations of the same theme, people needing to notice better when someone is trying to message them.
Sorry that I am resurrecting an older thread but I have to ask if there has been any decent headway made with this issue. I find notifications to be very hit or miss when it comes to the talk app and like Brendan has mentioned it really can disrupt the work flow and make it hard to completely move away from other non-self hosted services.
Pretty much exactly what Brendan described. If one of my users is sent a message they don’t always get a notification.
We find this to be especially true if the user is logged in to the chat client on android and has a web tab open (without focus) at the same time. For example I typically have a Next Cloud tab open, and my android phone signed into the Talk app. 90% of the time if I get a notification it will be browser only and my phone will remain silent. That doesn’t work because if I step away from my desk and am sent a message that needs immediate action, it notifying on the computer will not be seen until I return to the computer.
Additionally, if there was already one message notified, it will not notify of additional messages. For example I message a user, they get notified but they haven’t read it yet and then someone else messages them they won’t get a 2nd (or 3rd or 4th) notification until they read the initial message.
Ideally it needs to notify on all connected devices with every message.
I hope that makes sense. I can probably do a screen recording of the issue if that helps.
Perhaps they have either muted notifications or not enabled them.
Are you sure you’ve enabled notifications for your phone? I have no trouble receiving notifications on Android. Actually turned mine off because they were constant.
How have you setup your notifications? Are you using the Nextcloud Push service? Something else?
Always super helpful and appreciated!
You can also join the public Talk team chat at Nextcloud
Not having the notifications enabled, or muted was my 1st through. The users have notifications enabled and not muted.
Yes I have notifications enabled on the phone because I do get periodic notifications…specifically if I don’t have a nextcloud tab open, or the computer is shutdown.
I have the default setup in place. Is there a tutorial somewhere that would help me go through the settings to ensure I didn’t miss anything?
I’ll see what I can do about getting a few screen recordings stitched together to try and demonstrate what is happening. Might take a little time. In the meantime I’ll head over to the chat and see if there is a simple “click this button” that I missed
This is exactly what I seem to be running into. I also see in here that a lot of people don’t understand why this is intensional and I have to admit I don’t either. It really precludes the use of Nextcloud in a production environment because people expect notifications unless the tab/client is specifically open and being interacted with. And if you have multiple conversations going and a message comes in on one that you are not actively engaged with you expect to be notified.
Sadly we had to migrate to Slack as this proved to be too ineffective for real-time business. We still use it for limited groups where asynchronous communication is fine.
I had a lot of trouble and wasted so much time finding a usable solution for the Talk notification. I tried both Google app, F-droid version many times. Sometimes notifications worked sometimes didn’t. On my last attempt (F-droid version) right after login via “Alternative log in using app token” it shows the message: “Push notifications disabled” don’t know why. Even if I grant notification permission for the app and turn off battery optimization doesn’t help.
Anyway back to the solution I found. I installed NextcloudServices app from F-droid. It looks like a good alternative for NC Talk notification / NC notification at all and it seems to be working.
My actual setup:
Nextcloud Hub 3 (25.0.1)
Asus_X00QD (Android 9, ww_16.0615.2006.131)
I also figured out that if you use 2FA for a user account and log into the Google Play → Talk app via username, password, and 2FA confirmation, notification works only partly or doesn’t work. On the other hand, when I generated App token and used it to login in, notifications seem to be working now.