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.
For me that would be a NO-GO too. It is good that there are two options for Office in nextcloud so I hope that this issue will be solved too.
Similare to the Passwords App where the server fetches it. (Link unlinked)
https ://help.nextcloud.com/t/passwords-app-uses-third-party-connection-raw-githubusercontent-com-is-that-really-necessary/95788
Luckily, the dev changed that for good.
I wrote a new comment in the issue. Maybe someone must open another issue for āUpdateCheckā Collabora Online in Nextcloud. It cannot be that Collabora Online in Nextcloud has to determine on Collaboraās servers whether the version is up to date or not. Nextcloud has its own appstore for this purpose.
This sounds good. Which then of course should be the default for the Nextcloud app. Because as you pointed out earlier, we donāt need a separate update check there.
There is a relevant welcome message compile-time option. How hard would it be to maintain a fork where the only change is to disable the welcome message? It could be a very lightweight fork that keeps abreast of upstream CollaboraOnline/online code.
The difficult part of the fork would be devops (build, test, packaging releases) and re-branding (assuming that is necessary). The build looks rather complex.
To any would-be fork enthusiasts: I think we should consider that if Collabora is committed to gathering usage data by āphoning homeā (and letās be honest: itās their business and their call to do so, lots of FOSS phones home, and phoning home from FOSS is generally done in good faith), that some kind of phone-home will always be included in the upstream code. Hereās another example of what Iād call a āgood-faith phone homeā (thereās a good reason for it and the maintainers seem trustworthy). The difference with that example is the option is available at runtime.
For what itās worth, I decided to DNS-block rating.collaboraonline.com.
@mmeeks : Thank you for engaging so thoroughly with the community on this! I sincerely appreciate your time. Thank you for suggesting workarounds and being so kind and patient with us. But I feel like you are carefully side-stepping a theme that just keeps on surfacing: nobody wants the welcome message. Am I right? Iām curious if you would ask or have asked your users: āhey yāall: about our welcome messageā¦ thumbs up or down?ā. All the user feedback Iām seeing in this thread and on the CollaboraOnline/online#4489 github issue is that the welcome message is not wanted. If the survey were to have two questions, perhaps the second is āwould you like a runtime option to disable the welcome message?ā
@meonkeys we continue to work to improve things here - this is not the final state, and Iāve been giving thought also to how to help the corner-case of people who reset their cookies continually and so get a lot of welcoming. As I outlined, we need the welcome dialog to encourage corporate users to get support & services - and yes it works. As many pointed out for smaller / home-user environments it is useful to get people aware of and involved in the community too - but, I hear that some donāt want it - and some asked to restore the per-user / connection limit instead: which was better for their use-case. I wonder if that solves the issue: we could (and Iād need to talk to my releng) create two builds: one that has the welcome / get-involved (which is still by far my preference), and another that you can configure it off - but which restores the old connection/document limit. I wonder whom that pair would not address. Then again - if we could get transaction costs down enough - several people kindly suggested theyād be happy to contribute a small sum to help fund the work & get a different outcome. Anyhow - the focus for now is to make this less intrusive and address the concerns about remote server use.
The diffrence is that this adds functionality that otherwise would be hard if not impossible to implement. Phoning home just for statistics, or to determine whether it should load a nag screen or not is not a good reason from a users perspective. And since everything is encrypted we donāt really know what data is sent. And good faith is a nice thing in theory, but we all know where that can lead toā¦ and this is probably why many of us want to self-host our data in the first place.
In my eyes reasonable low connection limit address your goal much better than a nag screen for each visitor.
I followed the discussion on Github but I disagree with your conclusion. If I would be a manager my customers hitting a message āthis connection was blocked as you cross the usage limit of this personal/DEV software packageā would be pretty good motivation to by professional package. and I think maintaining two different versions only for this reason is waste of time. If your only valid options are to use the one or another use a switch: there is welcome / get-involved without connection limit or connection limit kicks in once you disable welcome screen using some config parameterā¦ this way you āprotectā the free CODE using only one packageā¦
I hope itās OK to revive this topic. It would be really useful to have an update on what happened in the last year. I have the nag and donāt know how to remove it. I am willing to donate towards solutions.
Background about me: Iām a regular small-scale user of NextCloud for personal projects or self-employed work. I love it because I wish to be free. Free to keep my data private, free of companies tracking me (meaning version usage cookies in this case), free to configure the software to run how I want and free of intrusive nagsš. I realise that software doesnāt write itself and therefore canāt be free of cost for all.
The suggestion quoted above makes a lot sense to me. Did anything happen?
The current nag based on cookies (which I routinely delete) and also āphoning homeā (or maybe thatās now fixed?) breaks my idea of freedom. AFAICS I canāt actually buy an upgrade to remove the Collabora nag as Iām not an enterprise, so I donāt really get the advantage of nagging me.
The connection limit on the other hand seems to directly achieve the objective of persuading Enterprises that they follow the license conditions and pay up. Maybe we donāt even need two different versions as it could just be a config option. In terms of bringing awareness of the Collabora brand, perhaps it could be displayed on the login screen alongside the NextCloud branding in cases where Office is installed??
If Collabora is not going to be change, then I would favour the idea of marking the Office app and any similar ones in the store to indicate the limitations in freedom (similar to what FDroid does). Or perhaps the NextCloud community could maintain a Collabora build with the nag being optional? Is anyone else interested in these directions?
The current ānagā screen, at least if you are using the official Docker container, is more of a āWhatās newā and āhow to contributeā screen. And no, it doesnāt phone home anymore.
Of course blocking it with browser add-ons or via local DNS is not a good solution at allā¦