Hi WhiteKnight; this really belongs in the Collabora Online github; but anyhow - thanks for your sympathy for needing at least some moral suasion to build a FLOSS business =) I was thinking we could change this to be an either/or choice. We could add a feature so the admin could choose either a limit (as before) on users/documents and if so with no nags; and/or optionally configure it to have nags and no limit (as now). Perhaps that can make smaller deployments happy, and still encourage large users to contribute to the project. Would that do it for you ? Ultimately we really appreciate the feedback that people give us to help improve the product; is asking for * rating and feedback occasionally a big pain; or only the (much easier to dismiss) welcome dialog ? Thanks !
Do it. Open an issue on the appstore github repo with the wording you think would be most helpful. Writing up a quick example always helps.
Thanks everyone for the prompt replies.
@mmeeks Thanks for your openness to engage with the community. Yes please I would very much welcome the feature that you describe, and I would happily donate towards it. Would it help if I create an issue on your github?
Regarding your question, perhaps one nag is worse than another, but for me I simply donāt want nags at all. I would like to be free, and for that reason I am willing to spend my time and money setting up my own server. I will choose the best available software that fits my definition of free, even it that means sticking with the ātextā app.
For me Collabora is just a component of my personal server alongside NextCloud with its various apps, apache, linux, php, the companies for hosting, domain names, certificates, etc. I simply donāt want all of these components calling attention to themselves and consuming the time of the circle of people I share with.
These people typically are non-technical, suspicious of my geeky ways and pretty quick to declare that they want to go back to using Google Docs. Likely everyone here can appreciate the absurdness of the idea that Google is less intrusive, but potentially you have also encountered it.
Also I am concerned about the privacy impact of mechanisms such as cookies to track the periodic display of nags. I donāt wish to own such data, maybe itās even dubious under privacy law as I never asked for consent.
You could pay for the regular license at $17 a user per year. Actually quite reasonable.
First I have to say Iām not an expert, but I played around a bit with the dev tools in the browser:
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Welcome.html, welcome.js and welcome.css are served locally and donāt serve cookies. But! they contain etags that are also reflected in the URL, which to my understanding may be even worse than cookies. However (and again, Iām not an expert), since the splash screen is served locally, I donāt think there are any privacy implications.
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More problematic is the feedback button. When you press it, it loads a feedback form from https://rating.collaboraonline.com/Rate/feedback.html However, this external resource will only be loaded if you deliberately press that button.
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I manged to block the welcome screen with the following Rewrite rule in apache:
RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} (welcome) [NC] RewriteRule .* - [F,L]ā¦but I have not tested it extensively, so I have no idea if it has any side effects. It may need refining if there are any.
I agree in principle, but you need to have at least 20 users to buy a subscription. So itās not really an option for home users. Also, if you buy a subscription, it will almost certainly phone home to check the licence, so this might not be an option for @WhiteKnight either 
Thanks again for the replies. Iāll try to sum up, all of these are IMHO
.
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A key principle of Nextcloud is to make free software available and it rings big alarm bells if someone proposes a āsolutionā of paying. Any statement about reasonableness of the cost is obviously highly subjective and anyway not really relevant because I believe we are discussing the principle rather than the specific amount.
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The discussion about what Collabora does belongs in their issue queue and I will raise it.
The discussion about what NextCloud does in general about apps with a paid element belongs here. Itās a delicate matter that needs to be handled correctly to allow a balance of freedom for users and income for developers. I will raise it as suggested and I am willing to sponsor towards the cost of it.
- I propose that Collabora should be categorised in the app store with flags something like this:
- āYellow alertā: app requires payment for enterprise use. This alert is not in any way a criticism or suggestion things should be otherwise. Nevertheless it should be noted for transparency to allow people to make an informed decision.
- āRed alertā: app is ānag-wareā. My definition of this term is that the app has mandatory UI features that demand userās interaction and they can be removed by paying. This is a behaviour that should be strongly discouraged and potentially it means the featured status should be removed and the app becomes less easy to find.
- Iām also not an expert, but probably the privacy is OK. I guess the etag is just a neat way to re-show the welcome page for a new version.
- I see a clear risk that the two issues I raise will sit there and nothing will happen. There is a third option which is for a group of NextCloud enthusiasts to create a community build of Collabora with the nag removed. It seems a shame and it would surely be better to avoid it, as it potentially encourages enterprises to use it against the license conditions.
It would make more sense for yellow flag to mean this. I donāt think the color system will be accepted unless it basically matches AI ratings.
Nag screen does not limit use, but cutting off the ability to edit at all on mobile (OnlyOffice) is in a worse flag score than a nag screen.
I seem to be a bit lost hereā¦ about which version are you running exactly? @WhiteKnight
is it a collabora on itās own or is it the so called NC-office? and which version number?
Interesting, it certainly sounds like a good idea to compare with the Ethical AI ratings and I see that they have 4 colours.
Perhaps the answer is orange for nagā¦
- āScalability limit for freeā seems like a yellow. This encourages funding the project from enterprises (who are making money and would otherwise pay the likes of Google), which is probably the most desirable from a user perspective.
- āOccasional nag for freeā seems like an orange. This is targeting ordinary end users (who could get a free, but-non-private service from Google), but itās still usable.
- āSignificant feature limitation for freeā seems like a red. This is targeting end users and making the product unusable for many use cases. Perhaps these should cease to be āfeaturedā apps?
I installed Collabora 23.05 as a standalone deb file. However I believe that my comments are fairly general, they arenāt really tied to a specific version.
thanks for clearing thatā¦
well from my understanding there clearly shouldnāt be any nagging with nc-office, which you donāt have installed apparently.
in general I am with you about the nag concerning the official and standalone-version of collabora. I consider it fair and great that mmeeks offered to change it for the better.
so my question here is: why donāt you use nc-office instead?
Also, are we clear on the differences between nc-office and collabora? Asking as I do not use either (Pi is too slow).
Thatās a very good question, and itās all quite confusing. Iāve done some brief research and it looks like there is no āinsteadā.
Thereās a lot of publicity about NextCloud Office, but it seems to refer to the same thing that weāre already talking about: NextCloud plus a Collabora Online server. See installation instructions and blog post.
Apsolutely correct:
Nextcloud Office serves as WOPI Host
Collabora Office serves as the WOPI Client
In cleartext, Nextcloud Office is only the Host for Collabora Office.
ernolf
Youāre of course correct. 
But @JimmyKater probably refers to the built-in Collabora server: https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/richdocumentscode
@WhiteKnight ā¦which, by the way, is not marked as āfeaturedā
ā¦and they also seem to have removed/disabled the welcome screen on that one. Or at least I could not get it to appear in a quick test.
I have some good news. I discovered a configuration settings home_mode.enable that seems to disable the nags. Thereās not much documentation however you can see it working in the code.
Please can anyone else confirm? Is there any way we can document this to spread awareness within NextCloud?
Nice finding
I just pulled the latest CODE Docker image and added home_mode.enable as an environment variable when starting the container, and voilĆ , no nag screen
So Iād say things are looking good, letās see if they stay that way. Iām cautiously optimistic.
Great thanks for confirming.
I raised another issue Explain the free installation options for Collabora
Well Iām not so sure anymore whether passing the environment variable had any effect at all. In the meantime I have tried all possible combinatons likeā¦
"home_mode_enable"
"home_mode_enable=false"
"home_mode_enable=true"
"extra_params=--o:home_mode.enable=true"
"extra_params=--o:home_mode.enable=false"
etcā¦
ā¦and I could not get the nag screen to appear, even without passing the variable at all. So maybe they finally removed it for goodā¦?!?
But letās wait and see if we get an official response to your GitHub issue.