How long have Nextcloud file shares had "Get a free account..."

🏷️ General
1

Nextcloud version (eg, 12.0.2): 14 RC2
Operating system and version (eg, Ubuntu 17.04): Ubuntu 17.10
Apache or nginx version (eg, Apache 2.4.25): Apache 2.4.33
PHP version (eg, 7.1): 7.1

The issue you are facing:
Nextcloud file share has “Get a free account…” message and link below my privacy policy

Is this the first time you’ve seen this? Yes

Steps to replicate it:

  1. Create a file in Nextcloud
  2. Share to an email
  3. Open it up to get the preview page and look at the bottom where the privacy policy goes.

I don’t know if this is a new feature or if I never noticed it before, however I don’t know how comfortable I am with a link on my file share redirect to an outside site, even if it is the nextcloud official page. I don’t want people to come to me about they’re “free account” not working when they try to sign into my share when they signed up for one that nextcloud hosts themselves. Any way to get rid of the message?

Img:

annoying

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Afaik this is new in 14. It may form part of the Simple Sign Up initiative. But Nextcloud employees will be able to verify.

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To switch the “Get a free account…” message on or off see:

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It’s tremendously rude and a ridiculous marketing trick. Really makes me sick and tired, I thought I left ownCloud for these kind of strange programming actions. Horrible. And an option in config.php is just discouragement policy. It should’ve been an option on the admin page. Or better yet, it should’ve been A QUESTION in the NC 14 update progress! It’s not even in the changelog.

I think it’s mean and I just can’t follow what they must have been thinking.

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What they were thinking is to give first time users the opportunity to get a hosted nextcloud account for very cheap, with a single sign up process.

I understand from an admin perspective you would have liked the choice, and maybe log an issue on github regarding this, so that it can be handled in a civil manner. Giving admin of self hosted instances the option to turn it off during an upgrade may be a neat trick

Calling it rude is a bit harsh imho. This was meant to help people who downloaded the app (mobile or desktop) to get a NC service, albeit it hosted somewhere. Dropbox, oneDrive and the big G has been doing it for years. If you want your product to grow, this is how it is done.

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You mean ‘this is how it is done the Dropbox, oneDrive and the big G way’. I still think it’s rude, because it is THEIR advertising on MY web server. I don’t like that at all. And without knowing this on beforehand, I’m sending this ads to others by sending them a public share link. Without me knowing! And I’m the server admin! Don’t you think that’s rude?? That’s ridiculous.
I only saw this by accident and came here to search the reason why. It’s bizar.
Besides, the advertisement itself is completely silly since Nextcloud is nowhere near an easy deploy possibility of their product - you still need to be a quite serious admin with server knowledge. So to think that most of your guests would be willing to do this, is silly to think in my opinion.

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I think you misunderstood me.

Yes, as an admin of your instance I can ckearly see how you can feel it is rude of them. However, the service is not meant for people to create their own NC instances. What it is, is if you download the mobile client, and you launch it the first time, that is an option now so you can sign up with a hosted provider’s instance. That is what I meant by mentioning the three names I did. And although it may not have been in release notes, it has been splashed quite a bit over their blog posts and news etc. So claiming you did not know of this service at all is a bit strange to me, but that is my opinion.

Again, as you stated, it may seem a bit bullish that the option is not granted during an upgrade to turn it off, and for that reason I suggested logging a bug report/feature request on Github where the devs can see it and do something about it.

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Not everybody does this for the living you know. I’m just a geeky server admin for our research group. Nothing more. In terms of service integrity and do’s and dont’s I didn’t expect this. And I reckon a lot of others didn’t either. That’s my sole point. I think it’s rude. That’s my opinion.

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Update: the option is NOT on https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/14/admin_manual/configuration_server/config_sample_php_parameters.html

So give me a break.

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I’ve just been (“rudely”) suprised by this same issue.

It’s understandable to want to advertise for Nextcloud, but it’s a distraction from the actual action one wishes to use the software for, i.e., share a file, and have the recipient download your file with minimal hassle. We use open source software precisely to avoid this kind of commercial noise.

It would be nice to make a “show Nextcloud some love” link an opt-in, admin panel feature, not something that’s on by default with no easy, straightforward way to hide it.

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you can remove it
You can edit the config.conf file, usually located in your Nextcloud directory at config/config.php

Look for this line below, and change it to false:
simpleSignUpLink.shown' => false,

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I’m gonna close that one here since it was solved and nothing new can be added except for rants.