I have split this topic, since it’s going a bit beyond the initial post.
It is mainly a tool that community users can communicate with each other. They put some announcements here.
The handling of issues, requests for new features etc. and things that require changes of code, go all through github. Also for the official documentation, there is a github repo.
Check here on the web site, last section about the support options:
and here for setup issues where you can get help in the forum vs. reporting actual bugs:
Yes it can sound like it. In a few cases, where I could reproduce the problem, I have already forwarded a request when I was able to reproduce the issue myself. I’m not employed by Nextcloud, so it’s mainly issues I care about myself.
Reproducing a problem is essential, so it is important to know the setup of the person that is reporting the issue, and even when the report seems to be complete, there can be additional questions only the original poster can respond to.
They are hopefully working on the code, so they are rarely on the forum. Most of the moderators are just community users, therefore “we” say, report the issue to github where people read the issue that were working on this piece of code.
Why? Because you say so? Why don’t you start your own project? It’s all open source, fork the repos, hire a few developers, and someone to spend all day on the forums, sorting out posts that should be opened as issues on GitHub.
None of them was active in this thread.
Of course it’s acceptable. The alternative would be not to answer you at all.
That’s your interpration, and it’s wrong.
Well, that’s your opinion, and you’re allowed to have it. But there is no law that says that a developer of an open source project, or the company behind it, has to participate in the forums, or even run a forum, or interact in any other way with the users of the community edition of their product. Sometimes they do, but you have no right or entitlement to have anyone read your posts, help you solve problems, or file issues for you.
That being said, I don’t get the impression that the Nextcloud developers don’t care about their users, quite the opposite in fact, but there are only 24 hours in a day and full-time developers cost a lot of money. So it should be in your own interest that they spend their time on development rather than comforting users in the forums and doing support work.
I used to work for a company that uses and does FOSS dev work. We were always encouraged to look at what issues users brought up online, and not just via the but reporting systems.
Why else have them? If the devs dont read them, then at least clearly state that these are purely user support forums only…
And how do you know that’s not the case here? The developers are here from time to time, but with the amount of questions here, and the amount of open issues on GitHub, it’s not possible for them to participate in every single thread.
However, that wasn’t my point, and at the end of the day it’s up to each company how they want to handle it.
The deal for you as a user is simple: You get the product and a certain amount of community support and documentation for free. If you need induvidual assistance and support, you have to pay for it through an enterprise subscription. This is a very common business model for many companies offering products based on OSS.
How individual companies handle this in detail, again, is up to them. There are no obligations, not even that they give the product away for free. The only thing they are obliged to do is to release the source code within the the terms of the licences they use.
So statements like @plinss’s, which imply that companies and the developers they employ have an obligation to the community, are, in my opinion, completely out of place. The only obligation they have is to the customers who bought a subscription or a support contract, and to the open source licences they use.
The whole OSS basics tell us that you can have an enterprise product at no cost, and, in exchange, you can provide feedback to help improve the project.
The devs have not any kind of obligation to provide support. That’s why there is a community behind, collaborating to help general users to solve or report issues.
Not all users have the skills to understand how the whole product works, and it’s okay. Other ones (like in my case) have skills that complements the project.
So, support often come from people that is not active part in the develop, but try to collaborate with the project. And devs, for sure, receive feedback “filtered” to not make they loose time in a forum explaining things that, for low level users, have no sense.
This is how any of this ecosystems works.
So, please, save the useless critical comments, and focus in collaborate. It’s a win-win formula.