Read receipts are a basic function of a modern chat software. To remove this and only make it available per enterprise is such a shabby cash grab…
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“This change is stated in 6.0.0 release notes as well as some other restrictions and improvements.”
Just because it is stated does it not make acceptable.
“We have been carefully listening to our community, and bringing awaited and desired improvements and fixes, as you can also read at that release note.”
Please listen again to the community. Bring back a most basic feature of any chat software.
"We are not taking advantage of sys admins or users. "
Yes, you are. You made the software clearly worthless in the community edition in the hope of getting more paying customers.
“We are committed, and always working to deliver the best open source communication platform, with a well balanced set of features for Community Edition and for our Enterprise Edition offering.”
It is clear that the two editions are now out of balance. I think this thread and the already happened migrations are a strong sign of that. We will look into alternatives too. We will not pay 2100$ per year for read receipts.
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The issue is that the “Enterprise version” is not an “Enterprise version” anymore. Should be renamed to “usable version”. And “Community version” should be renamed to “trial version” as the community can’t use it anymore.
An “Enterprise version” should offer enterprise features: Omnichannel for support, gateways to other products (WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram) - simply what companies need and what they will pay for.
But removing LDAP sync (which was stolen before and which many private users and NPOs use, because they don’t want to maintain 3 or 4 different user bases) and now read receipts is simply: Ransom.
Which makes me think that another reason behind this could be that the company RocketChat itself could be in an uncomfortable position. Removing essential features into “Enterprise” and the 2-3 weekly unsolicited “offers” by email from sales which suddenly started makes me feel that RocketChat is already in panic mode to generate money.
It could have been so easy for them. The community was begging since years for a way to support the community version. They could have made easily >50k$ per month with a $10 community plan. But no, with big dollar signs in the eyes it seems there is an imagination that private guys will pay more than $150 per month for their family or NPO hobbyist club communication. And if they don’t like, we try to force them.
Finally that’s a barrel burst. Thinking now about such a plan is ways too late after that move went bust. In a survey I’d personally rate my trust level into the company RocketChat meanwhile with 1 out of 10. Bad development compared to the fact that I was a huge “fan” two years before, contributed to the mobile app in my free time and recommended RC to a couple of guys.
Today I feel good about my monthly donation to Matrix/Element. Could have been gone to RocketChat, but they didn’t want it.
8 Likes
Not much point if you remove absolutely essential core functionality which people have become dependent on over several versions. Should have thought about that before really.
No matter that it was ‘EE’ but never enforced. People relied on it and no amount of ‘upselling’ will replace it. But of course you know that.
Same as LDAP and the other stuff you have removed to leverage people to EE, and drop the rest.
I would but it really doesn’t take into account the instances I currently manage (there would be more but I now recommend they use other platforms…)
3 instances
2 community not for profit - one with about 15 users, one with about 50 though only 10 regulars.
1 small business with 6 users
2 still on 3.18.x because there is zero real benefit to the users by upgrading.
The other is on 4.x and the same applies there. May upgrade it to 5.x but won’t temporarily go beyond that.
The community ones have no budget - one could possibly raise a small annual donation.
The business has a small budget and had considered the EE version when you still had no minimum per seat plans, but when your minimum seats is 25 it makes it way too spendy. Glad we weren’t on one of the old tariffs which got migrated as we’d then lose all the EE stuff by reverting to the OSINO version.
Ironically as a EU user there is no pricing shown on your website - just EE ‘contact us’ - but I believe the minimum is 25 seats. I guess marketing are just embarrassed to display it.
I know these are not the types of account you want as you slowly move to Enterprise paid only so it would be be more honest to state that and just stop the open source model - give an end of life date and be done with it. Much better than the current death by a thousand cuts which is agonising to watch.
Rocket.Chat user since the late 2016…
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Let alone the
which shows the sheer desperation. Who would advertise security fixes as improvements in a major version upgrade? Just let’s me speechless. (I wonder is they are subject to compensations if they deliberately leave security bugs in versions that are not EOL.)
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I was initially tempted to fill in the survey but then realized there was no point.
If they are willing to retroactively remove essential features and then charge for them, they have already lost any trust we put in them. Even if they reinstated the read receipts for the community edition tomorrow, any goodwill towards them has been lost.
With paid alternatives from companies that behave more openly and truly open source offerings available, I think the way forward is clear.
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I was actively evaluating RC for a month and wanted to build custom UI and embed it into my own app but then saw that basic functionality like read receipts is not working anymore and gave up on it. Too bad. I should have read this thread earlier.
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I am not a linux admin - i am a mere small busniess owner with some it-knowledge.
After the recent message that you will not support older versions in push messages comming in fall I decides to take the painfull route of updating my old (3.17) but reliable system. I spende more than a full day on that bevcause i had to learn and figure out stuff - but i was pretty proud of myself when the windows client finaly connected again! And after the first message - i saw that i could not get the read redeipt anymore…
i searched for a while, thought i did something wrong etc…
I found this thread after all - and how to say it - I feel robbed… If I new that before I would have used the time until fall to find a replacement and use the old (working) version till then…
Off course I could have checked all the release statements before and figured all of that out but honestly I did not. It was just incomprahensible for me that such a basic featur could be monetized…
i am very disapointed!
please bring back Read Receipts!
thanks!
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6.0 is a downgrade overall. We’re lucky we run an air-gapped server so we can get away without updating for security patches. It’s a shame yous decided to paywall useful features like read receipts and roles, making your free offering less useful and capable.
When we decided to replace slack with a self-hosted alternative we spent a decent amount of time trying to decide what our best options were and RocketChat, unfortunately, came out on top. At the time it was a good product offering, which no longer seems to be the case as yous are now moving useful features behind a paywall to pad your bottom line. Not really an open source product anymore.
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I wouldn’t mind paying a small amount annually or monthly for push notification because I realize that’s a cloud service that RC is paying for. Maybe $5-10 / month for the server? I don’t know how much the push notifications cost - someone will need to enlighten me on that. That being said, I’m using RC for myself, my parents, and my girlfriend. That’s it. It’s a self-hosted 4 person family server. Why should I have to pay for enterprise for my use case? That being said, community edition still has access to features like off the record chats, rate limiting, SAML, WebDAV integration, analytics tracking, E2EE, and custom assets. I could completely understand any of those being moved from CE to EE, but read receipts? How does that make any sense? This is the kind of move that causes a significant loss of trust from users.
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It costs very little. The notification service is offered for free by Google and Apple. It barely costs resources. That’s why I wrote my own Rocket-Chat-Gateway and opened it up for everyone to use it for free with no limits. Check it out here:
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Ok I’ll rephrase - I don’t mind throwing a little bit of money towards the project, but I absolutely can’t justify paying for 25 seats when I only have four people using it.
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We have been using RC at our company (small team) for +4y. and we are evaluating a move to another solution. Luckily our production instance did not migrate yet to v6.x. We loved the product, but this tastes sour.
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Same here. Sadly we have already upgraded to 6.x and lost read receipt “feature”. So we are looking into migration to somewhere else. Most probably switch to Matrix which is really FOSS instead of OSINO. 
Very disappointed for committing very much to this community and now taken away such an essential feature for simple chat instances.
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This is absulutely nuts.
It is an essential basic feature present in all messaging applications.
If RC does not figure out how we can get this feature back without paying 7USD per user just for read receipts (we have absulotely no use for any other enterprise feature) we will be looking for alternatives.
At a bare minimum create another paid plan, Community PRO or something where you give us read receipts, unlimited apps and maybe LDAP features or some analytics for a decent flat monthly fee.
6 Likes
So what other app did you all switch to and how’s the feedback?
Any instructions on how you reverted from version 6 to version 5? Removing features is a nasty bait/switch, but I’d like to keep the functions available for our users until we can replace Rocket.Chat.
I’m running it on a dedicated virtual machine on a ESXi environment. So, I had the luxury to just revert the whole machine to the previous snapshot I made before upgrading.
Maybe you didn’t know, but with Rocket Chat 6.5 you can choose the ‘starter’ plan for small teams with i. e. read receipt for free. In this plan, there are other premium features, that you can use up to 25 users and 100 omnichannel active contacts, on the condition that you are use the self-managed installation. More can you read here:
Deciding how and why read receipt feature will come back and why other premium features can be used is explained in the roadmap to Rocket.Chat 6.5:
[48:01]
[I had to split the message into to posts. Sorry for that!]