Useless and annoying popup message on desktop

I am getting popup messages from my Nextcloud client advertising some conference in Berlin. Hey folks, please do not do that. This is not the way to reach your users. This is what email is for. I’m kind of surprised I have to say it.

Thanks!

1 Like

Hi Basildane,

Sorry you’re annoyed by this notification! We luckily don’t have the email addresses of all our users, nor do we know their server address, that would be quite a privacy violation :wink: so we won’t be doing that. You can of course sign up to our newsletter if you like.

Where this notification comes from

Your server has an app, the “Nextcloud announcements” app, with this description:

“Nextcloud announcements brings the latest news of Nextcloud into your notifications”

This is a ‘pull’ process, the app looks for a feed on our servers, we don’t send anything as we don’t have or keep any server data.

You can configure this app in your server settings, by default it sends these notifications to the admin group, not to users. As server notifications get sent to the clients, if you use one, it can then pop up on the desktop client or the mobile clients.

If you don’t want the notifications, you can disable the app or change the group of people who gets it.

You can find some more info in this github ticket: "Nextcloud announcement" - How to get rid of the conference news · Issue #426 · nextcloud/notifications · GitHub

Why oh why

Sorry if this was an annoying notification! We often get the feedback that people didn’t know our yearly conference exists or when it took place, that is why we send this message this year.

So it seems the vast majority of our ~250.000 server administrators probably don’t know about the conference (after all, it sure doesn’t attract 200.000 visitors). For many it would be an interesting and useful event so hopefully this was a useful notification for most of them. Of course, our goal is not to bother or disturb people, I hope a yearly message isn’t too much.

We recently blogged about our mission and prinicipals at The Nextcloud mission and principles - Nextcloud - your feedback is of course welcome!

3 Likes

@jospoortvliet
Thanks a lot for the detailed answer. It totally makes sense! I totally forgot about this app and thought that every user receives this notification.

Totally viable in my opinion and not annoying at all for me as the admin.
Thanks!

2 Likes

That works for me, thanks.

To make it even more obvious where the notification comes from and how to disable it, we’re changing the app a little: https://github.com/nextcloud/nextcloud_announcements/pull/50

Input, ideas, changes and pull requests welcome! As I said, this is not meant to be overused - 1 or 2 notifications a year. We just want to have a way to reach out to users with important news from the Nextcloud ecosystem
 That can be a big security breach, but, of course, also more positive news like our conference :wink:

2 Likes

I wonder why this solution helped others.
I am currently using two nextcloud servers and both had the “Nextcloud announcements” app enabled. But only one of the two servers sends me MacOS push notifications about “App recommendations” all the time. Maybe 10 notifications each day.
On that server I just disabled the “Nextcloud announcements” app but I still get annoying push notifications.

My assumption is that my private nextcloud doesn’t send me push notifications because I use it in Safari and disallowed the website to send me notifications.

The other nextcloud server I am mostly using with Firefox and maybe I allowed it to send me push notifications.

But nevertheless I would like to allow the Nextcloud servers to send me notifications without getting spammed by repeating notifications about apps.

[edit]
I hope this solves the problem persistently: How to stop desktop notifications for recommended apps