Welcome screen is displayed although it is disabled in config

klada commented 2 years ago

Describe the bug

The welcome screen is disabled in the configuration file but it is still shown after every version update.

To Reproduce Steps to reproduce the behavior:

Disable the welcome screen: coolconfig set welcome.enable false

Verify that the welcome screen has been disabled in coolwsd.xml:


    <welcome>
            <enable default="true" desc="Controls whether the welcome screen should be shown to the users on new install and updates." type="bool">false</enable>
   </welcome>

Restart coolwsd
Open a document as a new user
Welcome screen is shown although it has been disabled

Expected behavior

Welcome screen should not pop up.

Actual behavior

Welcome screen is shown although it has been disabled

Desktop (please complete the following information)

OS: Debian Bullseye
Browser: Mozilla Firefox
Version: 91.7.0esr-1~deb10u1

Additional context

This happened when updating from coolwsd 21.11.2.4-1 to 21.11.3.4-1.

benvei commented 2 years ago

I can also reproduce this issue with "--o:welcome.enable=false" in a docker compose. When you access a document as a new user / in a private window the welcome message is shown which is not expected.

timski commented 2 years ago

I assume it's a result of this commit https://github.com/CollaboraOnline/online/commit/16386b9aaf2a92a0661d3689078de86285894486

At first glance, I did not find the culprit, but it's probably in there somewhere.

klada commented 2 years ago

I assume it's a result of this commit 16386b9

Yes, you are right. They have changed this to a compile-time option, which makes no sense at all. I'll send a PR to revert this commit. The welcome message is really confusing older people in my family as they don't know how to get rid of it.

mmeeks commented 2 years ago

I'm sorry that this confused some of your home users! we will work to make this less annoying for our next release: and they should not see that again until then.

We do need a way to remind users - particularly large enterprise ones that this is a development version and we really appreciate everyone contributing. We don't want to enable large enterprises to freeload by deploying CODE and easily turning the setting off. Of course this is open-source - so everyone is welcome to adapt it to their hearts content as they build and maintain binaries themselves: that is why we have a compile-time option to configure this.

So - what can we do to make this better for you using our CODE binaries: I agree the current state is a bit too annoying - even though it should only show up for the first use after an upgrade. The dialog tells you about what has changed, about the mobile apps, and how to contribute - lots of useful stuff that people ask for regularly in the forum).

So we will improve it. We will enable 'Escape' to close the dialog - good catch (thanks for that), and in addition make it easier to close, and/or perhaps timeout if people are perplexed by the welcome dialog concept - hopefully we'll have some patch you can test soon, and you can understand what we're working to achieve here.

Thanks for your feedback.

benvei commented 2 years ago

Thanks for the explanation. I understand that you don't want enterprises to freeload. /edit: Although I don't understand the solution. If big enterprises purposely freeload FOSS Software, what should keep them from compiling their own images? I think this is more targeting private users, big enterprises probably build their own images anyway.

But here is the thing, especially for private users: I'm running a local club and we are currently trying to move away from google cloud due to privacy issues. I'm trying to use selfhosted services as much as possible and also provide them to other users. Nobody wants to see these popups. You not only see it when you upgrade, you see it for example when you share a document on your cloud to other people and they access your cloud for the first time.

If we want users to move away from closed solutions we have to provide a flawless experience. Some sort of banner or whatever is definitely annoying to non-tech users. And they can't do anything with the information anyway, they don't even know what collabora is, and they don't care about it, and I think that's fine for private non-tech people. So we should not bother them. I was really exited about the progress collabora made the last year, I was using it for quite a long time, but the last year it made big progess on beeing end-user friendly. But this issue is a huge step backwards in my opinion.

Please bring back the welcome.enable flag. Thanks!

meonkeys commented 2 years ago

@mmeeks I'm a home admin (I admin a Nextcloud + Office instance for a few users for personal use only). Not even on your radar as far as potential revenue, but let's see what we can do here. Please don't make configuring the welcome screen less convenient. I'd gladly pay you/this project/Collabora/whatever a reasonable amount of money to make this easily disable-able as it has been in the past (even though it feels a little like a ransom, TBH). It's quite annoying to move this to be a compile-time option. If you need to enforce something for enterprise users, maybe you can just put it in their Terms and Conditions? Maybe use a dual-license structure: FOSS for non-enterprise, something else for enterprise? Consider: it's not the home users that will become customers, all they want to do is edit an office document. How about if you (only) show the "welcome" content to admins (e.g. people like me) and leave the users alone? You could show it on https://nextcloud.example.com/settings/admin/richdocuments (always). And/or show a welcome message in the logs--I'm reading those often. Making it display to users by default and only change-able at compile-time is annoying enough that I feel an incentive to spend the time to set up a fork and build my own binaries, use something else, etc. but I'd rather spend that time helping y'all debug/test/qa, file bug reports, etc.

dinosmm commented 2 years ago

@mmeeks thank you for explaining.

As others have said, I too am a home user, I mostly use CODE to share documents with lawyers, banks etc The change to show the welcome screen ignoring the disable setting is a big disadvantage. It's not professional for anyone we send documents to to have to see this every time they access a document, it can confuse a lot of people and I've even heard people say "oh why don't you use Office" in frustration trying to close the welcome screen (this was last year, before I discovered how to disable it). As others have mentioned, if this is intended so enterprises don't freeload, this is completely the wrong approach. It's precisely an enterprise who will have the resources and time to recompile Collabora without the welcome screen, while home users end up having to tolerate it, while it provides zero incentive. Please do reconsider.

In addition, it would be welcome to have changes like this clearly explained in the update emails you send. This would help us not spend so much time looking through the forum and github trying to figure out why something that worked a day ago suddenly is not working or misbehaving.

EDIT: Having tested this a bit further, I find it completely illogical that I only get to see the welcome screen once and never again (on the same browser at least), but anyone I share a document has to see this before being able to look at the document. What is the logic in showing the welcome screen to people accessing a link share, who are absolutely not going to be at all likely to care about new features, let alone buying a Collabora subscription?

benvei commented 2 years ago

@pedropintosilva @mmeeks Do you have any update on this topic? It seems like this "feature" breaks usability for quite a few people and projects. Since it was silently introduced it would be great to silently remove it again, at least until it's not annoying to users anymore. Way better: Please leave stuff configurable. Thanks!

dinosmm commented 2 years ago

Wanting to be a responsible open source netizen, I asked Collabora about the price of a subscription for individuals/families. Answer: no such thing, you can only pay the enterprise rate for a minimum of 20 users at $20/year/user...! I did point out to the marketing/sales person that emailed me back the absurdity of this; I want to pay something reasonable to at least remove this splash screen, but I am not allowed to, instead, I have to suffer it using CODE, unless I am an enterprise.

Collabora - please revise your policy and marketing plans, things like this push people away.

sebalis commented 2 years ago

While I have some understanding for the motive, I am struggling to see this as an acceptable change. It makes browsers retrieve content (the welcome banner) from rating.collaboraonline.com, making it possible for that website to see IPs and other information about every user, not the server. ~~The server~~ Your server rating.collaboraonline.com could also set cookies and engage in tracking – I am not saying that his is happening now but the option is there.

In my view that is too much of an intrusion, whatever the reasoning behind it, and it obviously mpacts the wrong people – that is users, not server operators. Therefore I would ask you to stop this.

mmeeks commented 2 years ago

Some data on the other side - we have customers who have paid for larger deployments which have really helped to fund COOL's features, stability, UX etc. - in order to remove this Welcome. Similarly we have had partners who complain that people deploy CODE instead of COOL in large setups inappropriately - which is something we see out there. We do need some way to gather feedback and remind people this is a development version. Now - of course, we listen to your feedback - there are some ideas around removing this for external shares (if we can detect those) which might be helpful, and perhaps making it easier for people to buy COOL binaries in small volumes (I guess), and we should try to tune this - but the welcome is really there for a good reason: to improve the software for everyone. If you're concerned wrt. tracking black-listing rating.collaboraonline.com would be an option for the clients - and we don't track individual users of course.

sebalis commented 2 years ago

Regarding your last point: I can’t think of any context where it would be good to argue, “users could take this or that ~~matter~~ measure to circumvent the problem”, when they get exposed to the problem without warning or more particularly when they should not be exposed to it at all.

As for the underlying issue, I am wondering where server operators could have learned of your desire for ~~operators~~ organisations to move to a paid version. As far as I can see it, CODE is included in the templates Nextcloud provides for Docker-based setup such as the one described in https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/latest/admin_manual/office/example-docker.html and https://www.collaboraoffice.com/code/ isn’t exactly clear about who you do or do not want to use CODE either.

Again, I really doubt that taking initial steps towards nagware is a good way of treating this issue.

joergmschulz commented 2 years ago

retrieve content (the welcome banner) from rating.collaboraonline.com

This is bad, I promise our school to have a non-tracking and a non-data collecting toolset. It's a GDPR violation if I don't ask for consent on this tracking.

benvei commented 2 years ago

It makes browsers retrieve content (the welcome banner) from rating.collaboraonline.com

I'm sorry Collabora, but this is REALLY bad. This just went from "just" being a nagware to being absolutely unacceptable.

but the welcome is really there for a good reason: to improve the software for everyone.

Who is "everyone"? Obviously as we can see in this issue this is not an improvement for "everyone".

Sorry Collabora, but this gets really bad. Its such a shame that opensource office always has to be such a pain. First nextcloud partnered with OnlyOffice, then they silently removed the mobile functionality, then everyone moved to collarbora, and now you silently introduce nagware and the possibility to track every user and instance. I'm speechless.

dinosmm commented 2 years ago

Some data on the other side - we have customers who have paid for larger deployments which have really helped to fund COOL's features, stability, UX etc. - in order to remove this Welcome.

I'm sorry it is going this way, but I now have to question whether this splash window decision is a decision made by a new business exec or marketing person who is unfamiliar with open source and the (target?) audience. It's not a big issue, business regularly falls into the trap of bringing in new people who are business/money/growth oriented but don't really know the industry they are going into.

So, you are saying large deployment customers paid specifically to have this Welcome screen removed? Seriously? Are you sure they didn't pay because they wanted a professional and reliable installation along with expert support? Because if I were a semi-competent business person (and I have been), and I just wanted to remove the Welcome, I would just pay a few hundred pounds to some developer who could find it in the code and recompile it for me. It makes no sense to go down the expensive route with Collabora if all I want is to remove a splash screen.

Similarly we have had partners who complain that people deploy CODE instead of COOL in large setups inappropriately - which is something we see out there.

And how have you informed people and companies that you consider this 'inappropriate'?

We do need some way to gather feedback and remind people this is a development version.

Hopefully you are gathering this feedback here.

but the welcome is really there for a good reason: to improve the software for everyone.

How exactly is the Welcome splash improving the software for everyone? This makes absolutely no sense.

Here is what the situation is at the moment, based on the information I have gathered:

Collabora want large businesses to pay for deployment, but are happy (?) for individuals to keep using CODE for free.
Collabora says "we include a splash screen to make large businesses pay to remove it".
Large businesses who only want to remove the splash will easily pay a little money (if they don't already have the expertise in-house) to recompile CODE without the splash.
Large businesses who want COOL for reliability, professionalism and support will buy COOL formally anyway.
Individuals are stuck with a Welcome splash which is absolutely useless (as they are not even the target audience of the purpose of the splash!!) and damaging (as it makes CODE look cheap and crappy esp. when sharing documents with others.
Collabora even makes it impossible for simple individuals to remove the splash, as they don't offer any plan for individuals who might want to pay a little something affordable to remove the splash and support the project!!!

Please, would you explain the logic behind this, because at the moment there seems to be none other than a marketing decision that failed to consider these very real points.

benvei commented 2 years ago

Fully agree with @dinosmm, thank you for that comment. I just wanted to point out another discovery that was just made: The welcome screen loads content from rating.collaboraonline.com, you can check that with the network debug mode of your browser. It loads html as well as javascript. This basically gives the "rating.collaboraonline.com" host the possibility to inject code in every single running CODE instance. If that host gets compromised it would be possible to inject malicious code for all users who see this welcome screen.

This is too much. At this point I consider collabora code as insecure. I don't want self-hosted software to silently load content from a company which seems to make weird decisions. The possibility to remotely inject code has brought this issue to another level. Collabora, this is NOT ok.

See discussion on the nextcloud Forum: https://help.nextcloud.com/t/office-alternatives-since-collabora-introduced-nagware-with-possibility-to-track-users/138236

joergmschulz commented 2 years ago

for the time being, you can use:

image: collabora/code:21.11.2.4.1

mmeeks commented 2 years ago

An interesting ticket to read, thanks for the feedback. We continue to iterate what we're doing here - so please don't despair prematurely =) We already tweaked the welcome dialog to make it much easier to dismiss, and are considering what to do here next.

@dinosmm

I now have to question whether this splash window decision is a decision made by a new business exec or marketing person who is unfamiliar with open source

This decision was made by me; but lets be clear
marketing is a very important part of what we do: generating leads, that sales can close to earn money that is re-invested into improving the software.
There is no magic money fairy who funds innovation and maintenance - it all comes from a customer buying support & services, so marketing is really important. ... but:

@dinosmm

So, you are saying large deployment customers paid specifically to have this Welcome screen removed? Seriously?

Absolutely. It's a value-add to have binaries created by a vendor, that fits their needs and are supported. Having to pay someone to build bina ries is a significant cost / 'nudge' that encourages enterprises to do the right thing: ie. to contribute back by supporting the creators.

That's based on many years experience both writing the S/W and also selling to customers though nothing stops people building it themselves as they choose.

Other projects have welcome screens that encourage people to eg. donate, or contribute in other ways - eg. Thunderbird, Firefox, LibreOffice, etc. Nextcloud and ownCloud have a new-user / first-login welcome screen of their own - and other nudges - why not. They should encourage people to get support in various ways.

I think one thread through this ticket are a number of examples of this working to some extent:

@meonkeys for example says:

I'd gladly pay you/this project/Collabora/whatever a reasonable amount of money to make this easily disable-able as it has been in the past (even though it feels a little like a ransom, TBH).

I'm sorry it feels like a ransom that's not the intention! My hope is that we can tweak this to make it less intrusive for you - and yet retain the effectiveness that enterprise users seek out and pay for the enterprise version. And of course we'd love to serve you as a customer if we can make that work. A different approach we used to used (now abandoned) was to have a limit of ~10 documents open and 20 users concurrently in CODE. That gave other people heartache - and so was removed - but at least it allowed us to get the same message out - while avoiding touching the smaller home user.

We're really trying to get minimally-annoying yet effective nudge here to do the right thing that targets the right people.

@dinosmm

Similarly we have had partners who complain that people deploy CODE instead of COOL in large setups inappropriately - which is something we see out there.

And how have you informed people and companies that you consider this 'inappropriate'?

Good question - well, we point out that CODE is a 'Development' edition - and we encourage people to help support development by buying support from a partner left & right. Probably we could do this better - all suggestions most welcome - ultimately we want to get the balance right here.

Interestingly eg. @Games apparently runs CODE in their school. Many other schools & universities run COOL and in doing so help to fund its development, as well as getting support, its good to get the message out.

Similarly @sebalis wonders:

wondering where server operators could have learned of your desire for operators to move to a paid version. ... https://www.collaboraoffice.com/code/ isn't exactly clear about who you do or do not want to use CODE either.

You're right - there is clearly an un-met need to get the message out - the welcome is a first-cut at this; prolly we should have a 'buy support' or something on the community page somewhere. You might think that it is most important to get the message out to admins but showing to only them drastically reduces effectiveness I expect: but special-casing admins could be an ingredient in a better solution.

Collabora want large businesses to pay for deployment, but are happy (?) for individuals to keep using CODE for free.

Lets me suggest that we should all be contributing to the FLOSS they we, in some constructive way and ideally in proportion to our ability to pay and the savings we make. Since we can't assess people's ability to pay, and we don't want to be intrusive, we provide unlimited binaries of our software to everyone and call it a Development version. We have a welcome screen in that highlights what's new, and encourages people to contribute. We also have special pricing for special cases.

Large businesses who want COOL for reliability, professionalism and support will buy COOL formally anyway.

Many do, but not if they don't know that this is expected. As an example some vast number of people use LibreOffice in enterprises and never contribute a cent back: literally millions in some Geography's Governments - I like to think they intend to do the right thing but just don't know that FLOSS needs to be sustainable: that it doesn't appear from no-where magically =) someone needs to contribute.

Collabora even makes it impossible for simple individuals to remove the splash, as they don't offer any plan for individuals who might want to pay a little something affordable to remove the splash and support the project!!!

As a single individual I hope that contributing to the project by clicking a button, or pressing a single key per release is (I hope) not an unreasaonbly huge cost to pay =) it should take a second or two.

but the welcome is really there for a good reason: to improve the software for everyone.

How exactly is the Welcome splash improving the software for everyone? This makes absolutely no sense.

I think I outlined this above - it encourages people to contribute to the project, that then improves the software. It's a pretty & welcoming way to do that I hope - nothing like as intrusive as a big Wikipedia donation banner, or a yellow Guardian subscription reminder.

@benvei

It makes browsers retrieve content (the welcome banner) from rating.collaboraonline.com

I'm sorry Collabora, but this is REALLY bad. This just went from "just" being a nagware to being absolutely unacceptable.

So this is an interesting point. Obviously - we're confident that we're not serving bad things to the welcome iframe, it is to an iframe, and of course any improvements to the CSP there are welcome.

But you're right - for those very concerned about tracking, we should probably introduce an option to serve only the internal welcome dialog. I hope that would help reduce the concern here - just serve an old (and potentially stale, under-translated) version locally.

I was also thinking - perhaps we could reduce the frequency of this for non-admin users to just major versions if they want that with some check-box to allow users to only show this again for major version upgrades (which is yearly). Would that help ? - one click per device per year per user? We really want to get some of those users interested and involved in the project.

I expect we'll move in this direction for the next minor release - there is clearly a sweet-spot here that minimises annoyance, provides a helpful welcome, and also encourages contribution - lets find it.

joergmschulz commented 2 years ago

thank you for these clarifications. Why not put one info/sponsor/what's this software about icon to every main menu instead? This can even be permanent, nobody needs to click on it, but those who do will be informed. Just like the current 'info' in 'help', but with more .... info. The welcome screen content instead.

sebalis commented 2 years ago

@mmeeks, while I see some positives in the thinking process that seems to have started, I still worry how you continue to defend what I can only regard as a grave mistake (if not worse) when you made the welcome screen load content from a third-party server. It is strictly not about how trustworthy you profess to be. It is the fact that you are creating traffic from users to your server who have not consented and then have to rely on your trustworthiness – this is an important and fundamental issue. Users can not know how trustworthy you are, whatever good statements you may leave here. Depending on the institution that runs the Nextcloud, these users could have good reasons not to entrust their information to a third party like you. They should not have to make that assessment. By apparently believing that you are “one of the good guys” and claiming that the guidelines of what is transgressive software behaviour and what is not therefore should not be strictly applied to you, you are already beginning to enter dark territory and losing that quality of “being good”. I believe that in the UK you currently have experience with the kind of people who want to apply one rule to themselves, and another to everyone else …?

There is no question that this part of the nag screen should be removed with the highest priority. You shouldn’t try to weigh this up with any concerns about the local version being “stale, under-translated” – if you can get the translation into the online content then you can also get it into to the locally deployed files with not too much delay.

pedropintosilva commented 2 years ago

Why not put one info/sponsor/what's this software about icon to every main menu instead? This can even be permanent, nobody needs to click on it, but those who do will be informed. Just like the current 'info' in 'help', but with more .... info.

This would be a possibility, thanks @joergmschulz for taking the time to think about this. However that seems to be a less ideal option because we would be "polluting" every place with yet another option, or yet another icon/label to scan and thus increasing the number of choices and clutter for the end user. And all that knowing that probably no one will click on it. It reminds me what used to be a standard in the past on desktops (the little help within window decorations).

I think if we agree on having a welcome splash screen that:

Provides valuable information [done]
- For future contributors (how to build it, file bugs, translations)
- On where are our community webpages
- For people that want to test the free mobile apps iOS/Android (many don;t know that we have a webpage with additional info and daily unstable snapshots for testing)
- On what's new (to mitigate choosing another non-open source suite simply because "I didn't know this existed")
- Offers the possibility to browse enterprise options without being too much in your face
Doesn't show always after the user sees it [done]
Possible to close at any time without further interaction [done]
It closes automatically after some time
Shows less frequent (maybe within every major release?)
Allows using only the local fallback welcome splash screen

we hopefully can move forward :)

devnull4242 commented 2 years ago

It makes browsers retrieve content (the welcome banner) from rating.collaboraonline.com I'm sorry Collabora, but this is REALLY bad. This just went from "just" being a nagware to being absolutely unacceptable.

So this is an interesting point. Obviously - we're confident that we're not serving bad things to the welcome iframe, it is to an iframe, and of course any improvements to the CSP there are welcome.

I also think this is not acceptable for self installed Collabora Online installations. I think this infos MUST be put direct in the source code. Also it is always possible to put in the self hosted html/js/css files links to collaboraonline.com Read CollaboraOnline und Nextcloud: https://help.nextcloud.com/t/office-alternatives-since-collabora-introduced-nagware-with-possibility-to-track-users/138236

stirnlampenbasilisk commented 2 years ago

For me the worst part about this is the fact that it used to be possible to deactivate the welcome screen through the config file. This freedom has silently been taken away from users of the official builds and Docker images. It is definitely not professional to remove configuration options from users without a prior discussion and notification.

In my case I am using CODE for a small non-profit club which tries to help people with restricted mobility or low vision to use the computer. For these people such welcome dialogs are a nightmare. Some can barely move a mouse and are now forced to click away this *** dialog. And some people don't even know what to do with those messages. Inclusion of those people is very important (especially in Open Source) and I consider this welcome screen an artificial barrier. It is very sad that people with disabilities are barely thought of by Open Source projects (this not only counts for Collabora Online). Or has anybody thought about ergonomics and usability here?

I do appreciate that we got feedback from @mmeeks and I also understand that you want to push commercial users away from the community/development builds. However I do believe that the welcome screen is the wrong way to do this as it creates additional barriers for other people.

Do you really know of any big coorporations who are using your CODE-builds in production? I would assume that large coorporations who make big $$$ could easily afford a support contract (and it would make sense for them too). And even if not, they have the resources to push out their own builds with the dialog (and possibly other nagware) removed anyway. So you are definitely hitting the wrong people here.

mmeeks commented 2 years ago

@stirnlampenbasilisk

are now forced to click away this dialog A simple 'escape' key should dismiss it in the most recent version - so I hope that's not an issue; as I've outlined we will make it easier for end-users not to see this so frequently. Do you really know of any big corporations who are using your CODE-builds in production? In a word yes. Some hosters do the most amazing things to avoid supporting the software they rely on, I'm sorry it is a real issue that holds the software back. Nevertheless we will improve this as I've outlined.

dinosmm commented 2 years ago

A simple 'escape' key should dismiss it in the most recent version - so I hope that's not an issue

Just a quick reply to say that, while it's great you are now thinking of changes, and thank you for acknowledging the severity of the issue, this approach shows another instance of not being fully aware of the audience. 'A simple escape key' is actually very complicated for many people who don't even know what an 'escape' key is as they never ever use it, let alone knowing that it can be used to close stuff. Self-hosters of things like Collabora are of course tech-savvy, but users (with whom we may be sharing documents etc) are most often not.

With regards to the main issue for me, this is that this welcome screen shows for every single person I share a document with, the first time they access a document (and again if they have cleared cookies or access another this/another document from another device), so from the perspective of people receiving shared documents this effectively shows pretty much every single time. I don't mind seeing it once a year or even once an upgrade - my main issue is with other users seeing it all the time.

Provides valuable information [done]

I dare say none of the people I ever share documents with (or my wife who also uses Collabora very occasionally) would ever care to read or click on it (especially the kind of information you say it gives). The valuable information is for us, self-hosters, and is much better distributed via the email updates that we receive. I also dare say this is the norm for other use cases (e.g. the club described above). Users who are simply users of technology will neither care nor be anywhere near to your target audience for what you are trying to achieve.

With regards to encouraging donations/contributions, it did encourage me to donate again, but only in the hope I can get a version without it, only to find out (as I mentioned earlier) that Collabora offer no options for individual users. I have donated one-off in the past, as with most OS projects I use, but this one was going to be a targeted donation/subscription to a version without the banner.

mmeeks commented 2 years ago

With regards to the main issue for me, this is that this welcome screen shows for every single person I share a document with, the first time they access a document

Sure - so we need to encourage our integrations like Nextcloud to tell us that a usage is via a shared link over the CheckFileInfo end-point, that's something that's worth looking into too - and shouldn't be too hard.

benvei commented 2 years ago

I appreciate your reply and discussion here @mmeeks Thank you for trying to find a solution here.

Personally for me two things are the biggest issue:

Welcome screen on shared links (looks very unprofessional)
Loading payload from a different server. (security, tracking)

As you said, for both there are solutions. The first one would require the nextcloud plugin to send information about who opened the document, the last one would require the content to be hosted on the local instance. This should be default! Everything else would just sound fishy.

I think it would be a great thing that you start working on that, and in the meantime remove the banner / include the disable banner functionality again, I think it would help the community to regain a bit of the trust that was lost during that desicion.

So please @mmeeks bring back the configuration option in the next release so you have time to get the other things right. A PR is already in this issue. Also please make a proper announcement when you reintroduce the banner. If I can make a wish: Just leave the disable welcome option enabled. That all above, and all of the discussion about this, seem to be a lot of work for a very questionable benefit. As pointed out by many people already, you are hitting the wrong people.

Appreciate your feedback! Thanks!

mmeeks commented 2 years ago

The team have crunched, and re-spun the builds, packages, docker images, and richdocuments-code to address this - they should be released (but as yet un-announced). We've disabled the remote welcome fetch for now - and we'll look into addressing making welcome less annoying and prevalent over time as I've outlined. I'm minded to close this ticket in a bit and split out the other pieces of work to do here.

Thanks for the feedback.

dinosmm commented 2 years ago

Thanks @mmeeks for looking into it and keeping us in the loop. One more issue to consider for the 'less annoying' part - yesterday I logged in to my Nextcloud from a different device, and I saw the 'welcome' popup again when. This is completely unnecessary - I've already seen for this update, so there is nothing but annoyance to be gained by showing it to me again before another update is out.

EDIT: Also, I hope 'over time' is a reasonable interval and this is not forgotten by just closing the issue (shouldn't it stay open until everything is addressed/solved?).

benvei commented 2 years ago

Thank you @mmeeks Please leave the ticket open until the "less annoying" part is also solved. I work in private mode only / clear cookies cache every day so I see the Banner everyday. Also it should definitely be disabled on shared documents, since that just looks unprofessional and annoys users who can't do anything with the information anyway as discussed many times already. Thanks!

devnull4242 commented 2 years ago

Please see the following discussion: https://help.nextcloud.com/t/office-alternatives-since-collabora-introduced-nagware-with-possibility-to-track-users/138236

We found almost this urls under rating.collaboraonline.com. We think there is not only a problem with "welcome screen" but also with "UpdateCheck".

welcome.html
welcome.css
welcome.js
slide1-left.png
slide1-center.png
slide1-right.png
slide2.png
slide3.png

and UpdateCheck/updatecheck.html

    <body onload="onLoaded()">
        <div id="user-updatecheck">
            <p id="label" class="snackbar">Ihr Server muss upgedatet werden</p>
            <div id="user-updatecheck--buttons">
                <button id="button" type="button" onclick="onClose()" class="ui-pushbutton jsdialog snackbar">Schließen</button>
            </div>
        </div>
        <script>
            function onLoaded() {
                if (window.parent !== window.self) {
                    window.parent.postMessage('updatecheck-show-21.11.3.6', '*');
                }
            }

            function onClose() {
                if (window.parent !== window.self) {
                    window.parent.postMessage('updatecheck-close', '*');
                }
            }
        </script>
    </body>

If yes maybe link or open another issue for "UpdateCheck".

mmeeks commented 2 years ago

You're right - our priority was to stop the traffic from the welcome dialog which was for all users; the update check is done for admins only - but should come from the coolwsd running on the server not the browser in future - we'll work on that. I'll file some sub-tasks.

mmeeks commented 2 years ago

This got rather long; the welcome is there, as-is for good reasons as outlined, we will improve the implementation in these follow-on tickets. Thanks for helping improve Collabora Online ! =)

mmeeks commented 2 years ago

Another short status update: we continue to work to improve here. In CODE 21.11.4.2 we are using a much easier to dismiss, off-line welcome dialog. We've also moved our admin/update-check to being server-side, and we've disabled welcoming for guests - although this required: https://github.com/nextcloud/richdocuments/commit/41a789842301c8cd6278cd502c7553c3e7e141bd

We got feedback from wee: that a reasonable low connection limit addresses the goals here better, and while welcoming is a good thing it strikes me that we can perhaps have a configurable 'home' mode that re-instates the old doc/cnx limits and disables welcome too - which perhaps can get us somewhere even better. I'll file a ticket for that too.

dinosmm commented 2 years ago

Thanks for the update @mmeeks.

I am now on Nextcloud 23, COOLWSD 21.11.4.2 but the welcome dialog still looks the same, and it still appears to non-registered users opening a shared document - is this not supposed to happen any more?

zzkt commented 2 years ago

a quick and dirty workaround when self hosting could be deleting the 'welcome' folder after an upgrade

e.g. sudo rm -rf /usr/share/coolwsd/browser/dist/welcome

mmeeks commented 2 years ago

@dinosmm good question - it is possible you need the latest richdocuments that has a patch that annotates external users as guests so we can behave differently there. Can you report your richdocuments version, and @juliushaertl - is that released ?

dinosmm commented 2 years ago

@mmeeks I have v5.0.5 of what is now called Nextcloud Office, COOLWSD 21.11.5.1, LOKit 21.06.30.1, if that helps.

juliushaertl commented 2 years ago

This is now released as 5.0.6 and 6.1.1 for Nextcloud Office

naelfe commented 1 year ago

I am sorry to also add input to this topic. For a long time, since the docker parameter was removed, I I've had the same problem as multiple users here. I am a private person and use nexctloud mostly for myself and occasionally my SO / parents.

So far while using desktop+browser, I can't complain too much. I think the behavior is as described and expected. I tend to not notice, because on both PCs I use, I have either MS Office, or Libre office (work and private) in combination with NC windows client. So I usually don't use collabora there.

But now to the actual problem: I mostly use it on my iPhone with the NC iOS app. And here the welcome screen is displayed EVERY time I open a document. It's been this way since the config parameter for docker has been removed. I searched for a solution a while back- but did not find any. I also found an article describing the combination of browser / cookies / version info- but that was only for desktop / browser. I also found this one https://help.nextcloud.com/t/collabora-update-splashscreen/152802 which seems to describe my exact problem. I have no problem with the message once for every release change. But opening a document in the mobile app (iOS), switching to a photo to check for something and switching back to the mobile app just to re-opnen the welcome screen every time can't be intended.

P.S. Sorry again, but it is hard to find anything to this issue, because all results will be either the missing config option, or that it is too frequent with the cookies.

Kind regards

mmeeks commented 1 year ago

@naelfe thanks for reporting ! I've split this out to a separate ticket so we can handle it there: https://github.com/CollaboraOnline/online/issues/5854

hugalafutro commented 1 year ago

a quick and dirty workaround when self hosting could be deleting the 'welcome' folder after an upgrade

e.g. sudo rm -rf /usr/share/coolwsd/browser/dist/welcome

Will this not break anything and truly disable the nagging nag? Last thing I need is for my family to "see" some invisible transparent unwelcome "welcome screen" or some such.

edit: I took ther plunge and so far so good. I couldn't delete the dir in docker so I just force bind mounted a read only empty directory over it like so:

    volumes:
      - ./collab_fonts:/opt/collaboraoffice/share/fonts/truetype/local:ro
      - ./no_nag_please_kthx:/usr/share/coolwsd/browser/dist/welcome:ro

edit2: tested it's working by going to collabora / help / Latest Updates which gloriously does nothing now.

As a sidenote - NONE of my users are ever interested in anything the nag says, they're only confused why is it there again and again and again. The only one who's interested in changelog is me as the admin, who reads it on forum/github/wherever like normal person and even if you'd put them in the nag I still wouldn't read them there as if I see any kind of nag (call it splash screen if you want, it's still nag) popup the only portion of it I look at is where the close button/icon is hidden.

edit: log from fresh instance I just spun out for a mate:

wsd-00001-00054 2023-03-31 08:32:02.576761 +0100 [ websrv_poll ] ERR  FileServerRequestHandler: File not found: Invalid URI request: [/browser/bcbca64/welcome/welcome.html].| wsd/FileServer.cpp:696
wsd-00001-00054 2023-03-31 08:32:03.955379 +0100 [ websrv_poll ] ERR  FileServerRequestHandler: File not found: Invalid URI request: [/browser/bcbca64/welcome/welcome.html].| wsd/FileServer.cpp:696
wsd-00001-00054 2023-03-31 08:32:07.337847 +0100 [ websrv_poll ] ERR  FileServerRequestHandler: File not found: Invalid URI request: [/browser/bcbca64/welcome/welcome.html].| wsd/FileServer.cpp:696
wsd-00001-00054 2023-03-31 08:32:10.218773 +0100 [ websrv_poll ] ERR  FileServerRequestHandler: File not found: Invalid URI request: [/browser/bcbca64/welcome/welcome.html].| wsd/FileServer.cpp:696

document is immediately displayed and editable with no nag screen

relikd commented 1 year ago

Beware v23.05 became unusable. The fullscreen "provide feedback" message now fully blocks editing of documents until the timer has run out. At least I cannot click away the message because the dismiss button does not work. Thus you have to wait 3-5 seconds until the message dissapears by itself. And that is EVERY time you open a document.

mmeeks commented 1 year ago

Wow that is a horrible blocker! @relikd thanks for reporting; we'll investigate ASAP - can you provide an exact version hash?

relikd commented 1 year ago

@mmeeks Using docker hub versions 22.05.14.3.1 and 23.05.1.2.1. I cannot click the OK button since at least a few versions. Not sure if this is something Mac related. But before I could just ignore the feedback message and now with v23 I cant.

relikd commented 1 year ago

OK button does not work on v21.11.5.3.1 either (just tested). So I dont know if it ever worked on Mac / my installation.

timar commented 1 year ago

@relikd could you please send a screenshot? Is there really a fullscreen "provide feedback" message? In Safari?

dinosmm commented 1 year ago

The fullscreen "provide feedback" message now fully blocks editing of documents until the timer has run out

I cannot reproduce this. I (as admin) see the usual Welcome splash, but it is dismissable in the usual way. I don't see any feedback or timer.

relikd commented 1 year ago

macOS 10.15, Firefox 114. collabora/code:23.05.1.2.1

https://github.com/CollaboraOnline/online/assets/1321720/cf7e6315-2596-467c-94b8-406ed72e57f0

timar commented 1 year ago

@relikd let's continue this at #6803 – let's not use this old, closed, unrelated issue. Thanks!

CollaboraOnline / online

Welcome screen is displayed although it is disabled in config #4489