A few days ago I tried to install Rocket.Chat on a VPS and it honestly was one of the worst experience with open source self-hosted software I’ve had in more than a decade.
Rocket.Chat is poorly documented, poorly maintained both code wise but also from an organizational point of view, and probably has a poorly written codebase. It can also catastrophically break after mundane maintenance operations. And the opaque pricing of the cloud offering is also a red flag.
I’m not the kind of person to give up easily, and I tried to give Rocket.Chat a chance multiple times. At the end, I’m done. Probably forever.
I published a detailed breakdown of my experience with Rocket.Chat on this post here:
This post will probably get me banned from the forum — and the post itself will probably be removed. My goal is not to stir controversy nor to shame anyone, but to warn the people behind Rocket.Chat that you lost, probably forever, somebody for whom Rocket.Chat was a great fit feature wise.
I’m obviously nobody special, but people like me usually gives up in silence. I’m offering here a honest feedback on my experience with Rocket.Chat. I have no hope on what this post will actually achieve — Rocket.Chat has apparently been plagued with issues for years now and I have no expectation for it to improve. But just in case, here’s me trying.
Good luck to those of you who courageously decides to stay on this sinking ship,
Olivier
Thanks for your feedback. We really appreciate it.
Please, do not worry about you being banned or having this post removed. We are always very open and welcoming to our community, specially when it comes with a constructive criticism like yours.
We have been undergoing a lot of code refactoring and paying technical debts like converting code from JS to TS, UI to React Native, new Message Parser. AND delivering new features.
I have been running Rocket.Chat for clients for about 3 years now, and have been working for Rocket.Chat for almost a year.
While those changes hurt - and some parts are indeed breaking - I can assure you: Rocket.Chat is a very powerful and flexible platform.
We are working hard and towards great versions, as our focus for the next quarters is to improve features maturity, scalability, stability and code base test coverage.
I will make sure to follow on all the items you pointed out. Some of them was already being addressed.
Also, please, let me know if we can schedule a call, so we can discuss this better or if I can help you on the issues you found (if you still want to give us try).
I appreciate your offer but I’m done with Rocket.Chat. I deleted my instance and I don’t have any plan to spend more of my time with such a broken product. A powerful product that introduces breaking changes without clearly documenting them cannot seriously be considered a powerful product. It’s just a disaster in the making.
Don’t take it personally but promising major changes and massively failing to deliver them is something that has already happened - see my blog post for an example. It’s not that I don’t trust you personally, it’s rather that I don’t trust anything that comes from Rocket.Chat anymore.
The fact Rocket.Chat was capable to create such distrust in less than two days is truly remarkable - I’ll give Rocket.Chat that.
Have a good day and once again, thanks for the response
I totally agree with @osc my experience trying to get it to work was also horrible…
It also reflects in a very poorly maintained community, the open instance it’s a spam trap, full of bots and this forum is like a black hole where questions or concerns go no where
It’s a pitty beacuse the solution has potential, it just need more technical care and users care
We, from Rocket.Chat and our Community itself are always trying our best to answer all questions and issues here on forums, open server, git hub and forward it to core team when necessary.
And as you can imagine, it’s a lot!
Regarding the spam bots, indeed it is a problem that we are working on. It has reduced a lot. We also have a channel to report abuse as well as some discussion going on about a distributed solution to be developed collaboratively. New hooks for user registration are now available, so we can create an App to act on that situation.
Right now, our suggested way of deploying Rocket.Chat is using Docker or K8s. While we still have all kinds of deployment methods (DO, Amazon, Snaps, Manual, etc), it’s a best option to have a more similar environment with the majority of the community and get help when needed.
I am glad you are now happy, and also glad that we have awesome open source communication platform to choose from
Thanks for your input and be sure we are working on them!
Just for fun, I tried to create a Droplet with the updated image and Rocket.Chat… failed to start. Plain and simple. And because the documentation is so catastrophically lacking, I have absolutely no idea how to troubleshoot this.
Once again, I’m not dunking on anyone. Just sharing my experience.
I think the advantage and as well as the curse of rocket chat is that it is available on many platforms. It can be installed in many ways on a server. Which raises problems of maintenance with documentation and so on.
However, rocket chat provides installation methods for less and more experienced users.
Personally when I started with rocket chat I used docker and caddy as a reverse proxy. Installing rocket.chat is not complicated and configuring caddy is very easy.
I make my project available to you on github. At the bottom of the page is a video on how to set up a working server in 3 minutes using docker + caddy. Of course, this is not an official method of configuration - I created it as a community.
