In my opinion the Rocket.chat client should skip the part about prompting the user for a server URL and just login to open.rocket.chat. The user can then later click to add another server. In other words, everyone who uses rocket should be connected to open.rocket.chat server in addition to any other team servers they use.
I think it should be configurable. There is a big advantage to having a single server that most log into by default. For instance, an app or bot marketplace could host bots via that central server and then non-central servers would only need to worry about bots that are not in the central db.
In general, rocket could begin to have some of the ease of use features of the other chat services, without giving up the use case you prefer, which is a standalone server in isolation.
I think you’re wanting to turn RocketChat more into WhatsApp or Skype where it works out of the box, which I get and appreciate, that makes sense.
Instead, I propose that welcome emails should include a URL like rocketchat:yourservernamehere.com/configuration/username and by running that, you automatically add the server and username to the client.
The user will connect and be prompted to register and then login and then they will be taken to a DM with the sender, in the example above that is my username. It seems ideal for this, right?
I believe we actually have go links now that will let you send a link and it will auto add a server.
As to auto joining open.rocket.chat… That’s not our goal. Our goal is for open.rocket.chat to be our community server for those working on integrating, developing, running etc.
End users we don’t want to confuse them by sending them to a server they don’t want to be involved in. Not to mention… an already huge server becomes mammoth.
Helping users find their servers based on email is I think something that has been thrown around. As well as of course the go links to quickly and easily join a server.
@rafael.kellermann do you know if we have go link behaviour documented anywhere yet?
We’re working in a different approach in the onboarding now, this is currently in progress. Basically we’ll make much more clear that the user can connect to his own server, the community server or create a new server for him to start chatting.
That looks really nice. It would also be great if the mobile and desktop clients could be built to override this and default to a given server in order to skip this step altogether. In our fork we skip this step so users don’t have to think about it.
Yes, this is already a possibility in iOS and we do plan to do that for Android as well. We know many people from the community wants to build their own fork with only their server access… if you’ve this feature available already, would you mind sending us a PR?
Yes definitely. However, we hardcoded it. Can you suggest how we might make this a part of the build? Or, anyway, somehow make it more of a configuration parameter as opposed to the hardcode that we have? What is the best way to do this?
Thanks Rafael. And I was offbase about the functionality we have implemented in WideChat. We do not skip the server selection screen. We just change the default value. But our plan is to skip the server selection screen - perhaps just by modifying the welcome screen since that looks so nice. I seem to remember that a developer created a sort of tutorial walk through on first use. Is that also going to be included?
We already made lots of changes on this behaviour for both iOS and Android… they do not connect automatically to open unless you press “Connect to the Community”. Should we close this discussion?
I think this is not a sensible way in all environments and will lead to confusion for some users, because open.rocket.chat will be confused with the company’s own RC.
Agreed, this is really confusing to non-technical users. I already get people who go through the onboarding, say they messaged someone and don’t know why they didn’t get the message; the reason usually being that the recipient isn’t logged into the community Rocket.Chat server, they are instead signed into the company one, as they should be, but will miss the message from that person.
“Connect to the community” looks too much like a “next” style button as it’s at the bottom of the UX, and non-technical users will likely assume it’s their company’s community-- not a piece of chat software’s community.
