Enforcing Registration Requirement to Utilize Push Gateway

Announcements
42

Absolutely spot on.

I’m a touch more incensed as I gave a lot of time to Rocket (I can’t dev JS but I can do a lot of other stuff, and did) but the attitude of certain developers sucked.

(Aaron is a great guy and doesn’t deserve this - but he has been thrown on the sacrificial altar - told to spread a message and probably only given half the brief as normal. They really have screwed him over on this one and run away to hide as normal. So as he well knows, my comments are not per se at him but the (dis)organisation he works for.)

Rocket was always meant to be a system for the greater good - I know the boss always believed in that. But something has eaten the inside of Rocket like cancer. The high ideals have been tossed on the bonfire and the corporate interests, venture capital funders and profit have taken over. They are not interested in listening to you and me - the ‘community’ is just paid lip service. There are some who don’t believe Rocket should be open source at all, and it is their influence you can feel all the time.

Yes, like you I have no problem with paying for open source stuff - I already do - and I totally get that it isn’t ‘Free’ and know that notifications have a cost that have to be borne or paid for somewhere.

But this is NOT the way to do it. It has gone off half cock as normal. People rushing around and not thinking things through, and not communicating well with their users. Say one thing, waffle a lot, do something else.

This morning I have sat here with a browser open in Rocket watching (pointless) notifications coming through on my phones. I have all notifications set, but they are pointless when I have a browser open. But there is no real way to refine this, can’t mute or stop them easily, and I can’t monitor it or count it to make a value judgement on it. Do I want to pay for that?

They have known for ages the code is a complete kludge, despite a rewrite of some of it not so long ago, and it isn’t going to get any better any time soon. If it was as reliable as some other chat systems they might have a point, but it simply isn’t.

I can imagine that quite a lot of people may move. Doesn’t give them much time, and there is no easy way to to compare usage and costs. But then that’s the plan, isn’t it? Change quick, try and keep them hooked in.

Anyway. Here’s the bug on this mornings unwanted and uninivited intrusion. This one sucks. Big style.

Interesting to see them wriggle on this one. My bet there’ll be a few long bloody meetings, and more than one ‘I told you so’.

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43

Oh yes, sorry. Found it now. I even typed in the search box and nothing came up! Cheers.

1 Like
44

I have been trying to get ready for this for week,s but cannot get cloud to even activate me.

Support request #15596 went completely unanswered now for 19 days.

New ticket just added: #16718, I got it to register, but now it says my workspace is “https://your-workspace-address” and that its community edition, which its not. I cant upgrade the plan, I can’t even get notiications to work properly as per the ffirst ticket.

I dont have "connectivity services”, only “cloud” and “setup wizard”.

Rocket.Chat
Version 0.74.3
Apps Engine Version 1.4.0

45

You guys have helped us uncover a number of issues with the registration process. We’ve solved a number of them and are working on a few more.

Because of the issues we’ve gone ahead and extended the date out another two weeks.

Thanks for your patience!

A lot of other points have been made here in this thread. We definitely are not ignoring them. I did want to quickly reply to a couple things.

This set of changes absolutely isn’t forced on us. It was planned a long time ago. A lot of pieces had to be put in place. But this is the hardest part we put off probably too long. Making sure our users find out ahead of time and aren’t surprised when pushes stop being accepted was super important to us. It definitely could have been better.

Also charging for push notifications… while the hot topic here… it is most definitely not the way we as an open source project/company plan to survive or make money. We’re talking scale of pricing aimed at covering costs of operating. I’m not a VC but can’t imagine that being of too much interest for applying pressure.

Regarding the security concern. Thanks for bringing up the concern @reetp I believe work has already started there on it and there will be a bigger response on that.

More details on pricing ideas and other concerns I didn’t touch someone will have a follow up post soon.

Thanks for all your patience everyone

46

How is this going to be handled for non-profit organizations? Can we register as one and therefore get a better rate in the future?

Cheers,
Thorsten
Bonusnorm e.V.

47

Does the Limit count toward every workspace or every rocket.chat.cloud account?

48

You are going to have to upgrade. End of argument.

Your version has not been supported for a very long time (there is a page at rocket.chat that tells you the support lifecycle but I can’t find it).

As a result you are going to lose your notifications on the 15th August because your version cannot login to the cloud system (assuming they extend for 2 weeks).

49

A serious chat application without push notifications has no future. You’re simply out.

If you force community users to pay per notifications, you’re simply forcing pay per use a supposed 100% free chat application.

So, I found this monetization by push notifications a danger for RC community and I’m seeing people rushing to other open source solutions or forking RC source into another true community alternative.

It’s a pity, because RC has become a true alternative to mattermost or slack, and I preferred RC among the others because its community version was pretty complete.

Now, I feel like if I got a free email client who charges me to receive emails automatically, per email, or I’d need to press “send and receive” to receive them. A total fiasco.

Let’s be sincere. You need to find another way to monetize RC, I don’t know where your salesperson come from, but perhaps he/she never sold an open source project and is trying to monetize what cannot be monetized.

I’ll wait until RC Team will give a proper solution to this issue. But I’m feeling they are in a hurry to charge when RC is still quite buggy, and issues are not closed (nor even answered), and you cannot pretend to charge for a non-polished product, at least if you want to keep your user base.

PS: Registration also failed on my side. I also sent emails and opened support tickets to the registration issue, nobody answered. In my case, I was already registered, but the fiasco with the 3.4.1 version, which let RC unusable for a DB issue, forced me to restore the virtual machine from a backup, and you cannot do this because the restored machine seems gets unregistered (that is another security issue and privacy violation, as the restored VM is de facto the same machine, so they are querying something from the computer itself)

4 Likes
50

Note you can state your organisation type in Setup Wizard. But that will undoubtedly just be for their stats at the minute.

No idea - I have the same issue with one instance.

I just don’t think a lot of these things have been thought through.

It would be argued that you might be ‘not-for-profit’ doesn’t equate to ‘free’ as you still have expenses, and this is just a cost of doing business.

No, you aren’t allowed to make a profit, but beyond that you still have normal accounting with income and expenditure.

It will be interesting to see what happens. FWIW the NFP I work with are likely going to move to Matrix now.

51

That’s where most of us will go if finally RC takes the wrong decission.

52

Hi Reetp,

thanks for the reply, I had someone more technically minded than me “update” our instance to the “latest” version about 2 months ago, as the IOS app stopped working due to our version age. Seems like it was upgraded to load the app, but not to latest.

Now I know thats what we need to do, will do so and hopefully it all works again, thank you

1 Like
53

The decision has probably been made. This is about implementation.

This thread tells you all you need to know - sudden decisions implemented without any real notification or conversation. Hoping they can just ‘surface’ without much warning - like a submarine - on the basis they can probably get away with it, but if you scream loud enough they occasionally might have to do a reverse ferret.

It is all shoot from the hip pandemonium, as normal. The headlong rush of the rapid release generation.

There might be a bit of wiggle room, but it won’t be much.

54

Thanks for the reply. Might be a bit off topic but it is relevant. I am exploring alternatives to slack for my organization and the only thing that is keeping me from committing to rocket.chat compared to others is that i cannot tell my bosses with certainty what is provided with what cost (right now and how it will change in the future). And I am sure others have the same issue.

55

You really ought to know me better than this by now because you know I am going to test this.

Screenshot_2020-07-22_12-16-47
Screenshot_2020-07-22_12-16-471203×522 63.3 KB

And I haven’t even logged in yet… mainly because I can’t because even if I allow that little lot, bar the Googley spyware, it hangs on ‘Continuing’ but never sets the password.

And you SERIOUSLY want me and others to use this cr*p ???

Can’t register in the panel.
Reply to a support request asking for a Token, and that then generates new tickets instead of replies (can’'t be bothered to register that bug)
Support presumably overwhelmed and probably hasn’t got a clue how to fix half of this so just ignores you (great Customer Service - fills me full of hope)
Add a token and that errors
Set a token but you ALSO need a cloud account which is just a pain in the butt (presumably trying to give each server an individual ID??)
Discover on the one server that has registered the token that some sneaky sod has gone and turned on Marketing emails in the Setup Wizard (you’d never normally go back that page after setup, but I was looking for sneaky behaviour)
Can’t change a password - probably because some of the spyware is blocked somewhere so can’t register the workspace either.

I could go on, But I’m bored with detailing incompetence now.

It’ll be fixed next version. Promise.

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56

Oh, and for anyone else following this sorry saga.

If you are in Rocket and go to Admin and then click Login to Rocket.Chat Cloud it will fire up a new tab asking you to login. That sets the same cookies as the reset password page does above. As does the Cloud Console button top right.

Unless you are anally retentive about such things like me you might not realise that you now have tracking cookies set on your browser by Rocket and 3rd parties. Two years for the stripe.com one. Nice.

What do I want stripe.com setting JS and cookies on my machine for Aaron? I haven’t paid for anything so what business is it of theirs to track me??

And why do I want GoogletagManager stuffing its insidious JS on my machine for Aaron?

I didn’t ask for any of this. You are literally forcing it on me.

The worst bit is you told me quite clearly there was nothing there…

3 Likes
57

seriously: I justify migrating from slack to rocket.chat in front of my boss with:

  1. we are on open source and selfhosted then, so no more costs besides the maintenance and our hardware
  2. privacy and security issues are really important to our customers. With a selfhosted solution we are in charge all by ourself and no company data is processed outside of our control

You’re taking away both arguments within one day.
This brings me in serious need for explanation in front of my boss. I spent a lot of time (= company it-budget) migrating to rocket.chat, contributed code for “slack corporate-export”-import and trusted your buzzwords about “your data, security, selfhosted,…”.
The window of time for this changeover is rediculously short.

I totally understand that you need to earn money but, you could: offer payable support plans, offer hosted instances for companies without it-departement, etc.
Don’t fool around with the open source community. At least: provide valuable information about push-messages leaving an instance so that it-departments can decide of migrating to a alternative or paying you. I need facts/data for business decisions, not a registration to a crystal glass.

Man, I really hope you are still an agile team of devs, come together and discuss this topic instead of box this through.

5 Likes
58

It was just a scam to force you invest in their infrastructure. I’m in the same situation now. But we’ve already migrated and who knows how to get export the data now to move back to slack…

59

I completely agree with all said above.

Moving from Slack to Rocket because it was free and secure. Now Rocket seems neither free (soon) nor secure (already?).

We’re already discussing moving to new platform. This just wasn’t honest from RC team.

60

I expected you might. :slightly_smiling_face:. But you also should know by now that I’ll address anything privacy that I can. :slight_smile:

But I did also say no tracking cookies. No facebook, LinkedIn, and other trackers that plague privacy across the web. We do still of course utilize analytics.

Google tag manager shouldn’t be loading anything but google analytics. And tag manager specifically we can likely get rid of at some point. But it doesn’t it’s self set any cookies.

Regarding stripe. Yup I’ll remove this. It’s right on that board of being tracking cookie. I believe they added a way to only allow this set at card insert and maybe not at all. According to stripe it helps with detecting valid cards. But I agree a bit odd having the cookie and script loaded at initial contact. I’ll investigate getting it not to set a cookie at all.

61

Just save yourself the pain :wink: You know I might not be around much, but will always be watching for rash statements.

We will be moving one instance to Matrix in due course, and likely the other to follow. Sad that some decisions have cost Rocket so many good people :frowning:

Using that tracking stuff just to login is a nonsense. I can understand some bits when you are making a payment (and that could have been via a panel in Rocket - the whole cloud thing is totally unnecessary), but even those don’t need to be everlasting.

Whilst you are about you might want to speak to Karina M in support (who has been entirely helpful)

My test instance registration is rogered - we discussed this on open.rocket some long while ago but I never bothered to get it sorted… hung in pre-registered and can’t finish it.

https://desk.rocket.chat/portal/en/ticket/16323

Hope you and yours are all well.

Rgds
John