I donāt know of any project which has such a welcome screen.
Ehmā¦ Nextcloud does
Shows the first time a user logs in. I do think itās a sane and valuable thing to have, but I also get that the Collabora one is pretty in your face in public links (we donāt do that on public links).
Iāve discussed it with Michael and he promised to do a quick change to remove the remote ping the welcome does until weāve come up with a better solution that gives users useful info and doesnāt nag.
Please understand this was meant to be helpful, both for users AND to help Collabora get valuable user feedback. Give them some credit, they give all their code away for private use (and for lots of corporate use, too) - unlike any other online office solution.
And they have some technical limitations we donāt have - like, if they didnāt want to show it on public links, thatās not so easy as Collabora is stateless and doesnāt know much about where it is displayed. So we have to find some middle ground here that is a win-win for everyone and that is technically feasible. Give us some time to do that.
I donāt care at all if there is a welcome screen or not or if it can be activated or deactivated. In my opinion it is part of the source code and must not be loaded from another source. This is the actual problem.
I think not that the welcome page of every Nextcloud is loaded from https://nextcloud.com I think the servers of Nextcloud GmbH are simply too bad (performance) for that
@jospoortvliet Perhaps you can communicate this to Collabora Online.
I agree. I think that would be a good option to only display the collabora-welcome-thing to only registered user of the nextcloud instance.
Showing it on public links/shares just seems to be unprofessional.
If itās about making a wish, I would leave out the welcome page altogether. If you really work with the software productively, you donāt need it or it just annoys you. There is an info or help button somewhere. That should be enough for normal users.
Why has Google become so big? Because it didnāt clutter the page with unnecessary stuff. But some applications try to take users for fools. As if you donāt know how to get the information when you need it.
Well, Nextcloud allows you to disable the welcome screen. So did Collabora in the past, until they have decided to remove the option to disable the welcome screen.
I think it is time for a true community-build of Collabora Online. Since disabling this welcome screen is still a build-time option we only need to come up with a build infrastructure to create packages without this nonsense. Right now there is no fork needed, just a hoster for the builds. But who knows what kind of tracking technique theyāll force on us through the next CODE release, so itās best if builds were in the hand of the community anyway.
Does anybody have any experience in setting up cloud builds through GitHub pipelines? As soon as we have community packages we could easily create community docker images as well.
by trying to hijack there software build process you achieve exactly what they want to preventā¦
I always argue against split communities as one strong community is much better then 2 half-strongā¦ Developing a full blown Office Suite is really hard job (even Collabora just adopts LibreOffice and turns it into Webservice) and community split makes it even harder (see OpenOffice vs. LibreOffice; OwnCloud vs Nextcloud) - it may result in better Software/Community but it takes ages and lot of hard work
@jospoortvliet If there is a way to work together with Collabora in a good way to stop user tracking and prevent companies from using Collabora for free I hope we can go this wayā¦
As a small-business/home user I have to say that I donāt fully understand the logic of this āCODEā release. For me it is just the āfree officeā more or less integrated into Nextcloud. It works normally well (otherwise I would not use it), and I really donāt understand, why Collabora tries so hard to make it look like a very unstable ādevelopement releaseā.
I think Collabora must have a problem with the business model (which is typically selling support contracts to bigger companies), and thats why they try this weird āCODE is so unstable and we want to nag you to buy the āCOOLā Version, which you can only buy when you are a big companyā thing.
But it wonāt be solved like this. If you need to sell more: Try to sell. Make it very easy for small companies etc. to buy the āgoodā version, give them something extra so that it is worth it.
In general I can say that āoffice on your own cloud serverā was a pain in the last years, especially when coming from a perfectly working Google Docs (the paid company version). Annoying installation (compared to nextcloud), problems after every update (files donāt open, or download instead of openā¦), nag screens/nerdy ādevelopementā stuff, and now even security risks with externally loaded code.
Arguably, any company that runs Nextcloud should be using the paid options. Sure, 6 euros per user and month or whatever the standard version works out to is money, but itās not a lot of money. Not if you compare to the likes of Office 365 thatās in the double digits per month.
Using community-supported open source in a company is not a great idea. It works, but youāre not helping. Nextcloud needs money to continue, and so does Collabora. Combining Nextcloud and a paid Collabora puts pricing still below Office 365 (which it should be since Nextcloud and Collabora is absolutely a lesser solution too, itās just under your control and not in an American datacenter.) The solution still feels more than a little wonky and hobbyist, very āopen source-eyā compared to behemoths like Google and Microsoft though. Hell, with Office 365 you get things like excellent mobile apps and world-leading email solutions, all this has to be done yourself for a Nextcloud. So you really need to have a reason to separate your solution from any provider before going this route - or, youāre a hobbyist like me who enjoys this stuff.
But the CODE server (or indeed any edition) should absolutely not be calling home, for any reason. At the very least such a thing has to be an opt-in. In fact, GDPR mandates that privacy stuff of any kind is opt-in, so this may in fact violate that, but like others Iām not a GDPR expert.
If someone is paying Microsoft Office, then simply using Nextcloud and Collabora Online is not worth it. Paying extra is always more expensive than single vendor (one product). Microsoft is using its monopoly to subsidize the cloud through Microsoft Windows 10 and Microsoft Office.
And when youāre tracked, you tell yourself you might as well use Microsoft with the better applications. GDPR ? Does not matter or is a problem of Microsoft Office and Collabora Online.
I would draw a distinction between what a company should do (ie pay for support for critical applications) and freeloading FOSS. FOSS does have a meaning. It loses that meaning if code is being quietly sabotaged to strong arm people into paying for something that is free and open source. Then it is no longer FOSS. The whole idea that someone can freeload something that is by definition āfreeā is a contradiction in terms.
This isnāt the first time one of these office suites has done something underhanded to Nextcloud users either. Some of you may recall immediately after Nextcloud finished ONLYOFFICE integration, ONLYOFFICE disabled mobile editing without letting anyone know. Pulled the tablecloth right out from under everyone.
I get that they need income. We all do. I strongly encourage my clients to maintain support contracts for any and all business critical software they use. What theyāve done here is not okay from either a FOSS or a security standpoint.
In the end, Nextcloud GmbH is also a company that prefers to report on the nice things rather than the not-so-nice things on its homepage https://nextcloud.com. For me, it is important with free software that one informs honestly and transparently to all customers. And smart users will always be able to find out in the source code anyway. At Microsoft, we donāt even have that option.
An update - weāve crunched to build & test a set of releases: packages, docker, richdocuments-code etc. that shipped a few minutes ago. These address the tracking concern here. As a stop-gap now we serve the welcome screen locally - while we work on getting this right in future - see the ticket for more details.
I never used Collabora since the statment that it is a development version scared me off. This is beta testing par excellence.
Since Nextcloud Office uses CODE too there is no difference.
Since mobile editing is important for me too I used this hack for OnlyOffice and I am happy with it.
Both companies introduced limitations and I am not happy with it either but at least I did not see anything like sideloading or home-calling in OnlyOffice. After reading this thread this gives OnlyOffice a big plus.
We are talking about two diffrent issues here. This issue you linked is mainly about the fact that there is a welcome screen at all, regardless of whether it is loaded locally or not. This might be annoying to some but at least to me itās not a deal breaker. What is a deal breaker though, is that uBlock Origin still shows me a connection to rating.collabora.com when I open documents in Nextcloud Office. This has to go away completely imho, at least in the ābuilt-inā server. The Docker container provided by Collabora is of course another story but I would recommend them to remove it there as wellā¦
Collabora Online - Built-in CODE Server 21.11.402
Nextcloud Office 6.0.0
@bb77
Hi. @erfus posted this screenshot. Because of the names of the files i thought the āwelcome pageā is loaded also from rating.collaboraonline.com .
Can you @bb77 post again your screenshot (network analysis) and the issue or link?
Iām not sure from where the welcome screen is loaded. It didnāt appear since I upgraded to NC24 on my test instanceā¦ But Iām still seeing this:
EDIT:
I totally forgot that I blocked it in Pi-Hole when this discussion startedā¦ Thatās probably the reason why it shows 0 bytes data transfer and why the welcome screen doesnāt appear for me anymoreā¦ Of course blocking it with browser add-ons or via local DNS is not a good solution at allā¦
Thank you for the screenshot.
Yes i think it makes not sense to use āupdatecheck.htmlā from rating.collaboraonline.com in the Nextcloud-version of Collabora Online.
