Large Simple Signup Installations: "Fair use of push notifications" Warnings #32165
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andristeiner
added
0. Needs triage
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Hi @andristeiner Thanks a lot for opening the issue. The Nextcloud push notification system is using servers run and payed for by Nextcloud GmbH which costs a lot of money. We are happy to provide this service for free for community users but if you are a big service provider or company then it's fair that this organisations pay a bit for the infrastructure they use. Could you send me an email so that we can find a solution here? Thanks a lot. |
I agree. It's just that we provide those accounts as part of the provider signup for free as well. Will contact you directly now 馃憤 |
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Sorry for re-opening this issue. I've been running quite behind the update schedule this year so got to version 23 only last night. What are the push notifications used for? I did not know my instance uses any of the nextcloud's infra (running my own stun/turn and anything else I thought is required), and I was surprised to know this isn't the case. So some clarity on this one would be appreciated. |
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Its used to push notifications to mobile apps. You can read how that works at: We encrypt and sign it in multiple ways/levels, so our server doesn't know whom we push to (no server/user name) and neither the content. Similarly google/apple don't know the content. |
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@nickvergessen thanks a lot for fast reply. Would https://github.com/nextcloud/notify_push solve this? |
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No that is a different component used by the files desktop clients to not have to poll the server for changes. |
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I just get alarmed by several schools that the number of users for the fair use policy has been reduced from 5.000 to one tenth, i.e. 500, with commit "Fix wording of undeliverable push notifications" by @nickvergessen on Aug 31, 2022. Also @karlitschek - as the limit of 500 users hits a lot of schools, during an already very very difficult time at the moment, it would really be a big problem to convince schools to switch to Nextcloud. Admins that pushed their schools to use Nextcloud would get under fire and it would be water on the mills of the large number of fan boys for "alternative" solutions. So ... was this reduction by mistake or is this really a decision? |
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Hi @agru Thanks for the notification. This warning is triggered because the push notifications might be throttled because it might overload our server. I agree that schools probably have not a big budget. We have a special program for institutions with no budget. Can you send me a message? We can probably provide free subscriptions to solve that. |
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@karlitschek - I sent you a mail on your karlitschek.de address. |
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@karlitschek |
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Yes. There is a tricky system in place that enables push notification for everyone without the need of google/apple developer accounts and without open network connections and without leaking any data to big tech. |
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2 questions: Is there a way to remove that message on the login page (and maybe elsewhere) isFairUseOfFreePushService() Is there a way to completely disable push notification (desktop browser notification and mobile) but leave the builtin notification in nextcloud? All this without going on the enterprise version that is. |
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I too would like these messages to go away. It's enough if the Administrator(s) are notified. Our users should not have to see this very confusing message. |
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As far as I am concerned, our big installation does not even use push notifications, and I would gladly be able to disable the whole feature instead, as our only use case for nextcloud is to provide a very basic web gui to access a bunch of SMB/CIFS shares. |
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Feel free to disable the notifications app then |
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The only apps that are active in my instance are:
Still, the warning at the login screen persists. |
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Right, I forgot about the login screen warning. The others will disappear by disabling the notifications app. |
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@nickvergessen Is it possible to turn off only push notification (mobile / desktop) but keep the notification app (meaning that someone will only get the notification when logging on the webui)? |
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We too would like to disable notifications, and more important the message on the login page. Are there any plans on that? |
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Currently there are no plan on that, no. |
You can disable the notification app like stated above, I would like to keep the notification app but without the push notification (so the user needs to login to see notification). |
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Sorry for being that rude, but my solution is now to disable the notification app not to bother Nextcloud GmbH with unused/unnecessary traffic and commenting out the warning in LoginController.php . We really love nextcloud, but our customers bother us for this message :/ |
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Like ask earlier, would it be possible to disable push notification (desktop / mobile) but keep the notification app (users can see the notification when login to the web-ui)? |
This is only partially correct. The device ID is not encrypted and needed to target the specified device. A device ID is definitely personalized information, according to GDPR. Even small organizations (eingetragener Verein in Germany) need to make sure that this piece of information is not entrusted to any third party without a contract. Therefore the push notification gateway should be disabled by default. Alternatively, I would suggest to change the user message accordingly. That means instead of telling the user something about "unsupported" it would be more to the point to tell the user of Nextclouds w/o a license that the push notifications are not covered by a contract. That would be more in line with "Nextcloud - a safe home for ALL your data". I would love an official way to disable the push feature. I know how to adapt the code and can do (and have done) so myself. However, I would love to this the official way and also not have to maintain private patches. |
What about optionally offering cost free notifications via an UnifiedPush server, instead of Google/Apple? 聽 P.S. |
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@kolAflash, could you open that as a separate issue and link it here? I think we should genuinely implement UnifiedPush as a point of importance. Every other FOSS app I use uses it. |
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We, and our users of the provider signup program, still suffer from this. Can anyone contact me or point me to the right person to talk to about this? |
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@andristeiner Don't waste your time, they will just send you their marketing guy and he will try to sell you their subscription. Been there, seen that... |
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I posted a workaround in #38122 (comment)
I actually did not even receive an answer to my request to sales. I asked about the free license for small volunteer orgs. I think the "community driven" is a thing of the past for Nextcloud. Maybe it is time for a fork. |
Our installation has tens of thousands of free users through the official provider signup program. For housekeeping reasons, we send them notifications and clean up those who don't log in every 6 months. Just disabling the push gateway is not an option, therefore, but thanks anyway. |
We do participate in the official provider signup program since its initiation. Since then, we provided accounts to tens of thousands of users for free. I'm pretty certain that this use case was not considered when implementing this limit, and hope I can reach someone to figure this out here. |
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Hey @andristeiner - I got the feedback from our team that you received a reply to your request. Did you check your spam folder? @svenseeberg I am sorry, but I could not find a request from you. Can you send it to sales@nextcloud.com? I will reach out to you then. We regularly provide free licenses for small NGOs, so it was never our intention to ignore you. Thank you! |
Yes, we got an answer last Thursday. Looks like we're required to buy an enterprise subscription for this use case now. Currently, about twenty thousand user accounts are registered on our installations through the provider signup program. Since the beginning of the program, we have provided this infrastructure and the corresponding user support for free. To be forced into a paid subscription on top of all the other expenses we already have seems kind of ridiculous. I still hope this is a misunderstanding and I can reach someone here who can help to figure this out. |
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As mentioned before you are losing your time, they will simply setup a phone call with their best sales agent in order to sell you a subscription/license. Then a few mails exchanges where you explain your point that you don't want to buy an enterprise license for a service you provide for free and then no more answer... I totally agree with you it is ridiculous, we provide infrastructure/services/support/and more for free and they want to sell you licenses/subscriptions for their own partner program. Actually it is not ridiculous it is sad. We are soon reaching a point that we are going to explain to +30k free users that because of Nextcloud we are going to shutdown this free service. |
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Tried that already. Either nobody at Nextcloud Sales does care, or I wasn't able to reach the correct person yet. |
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@andristeiner any news? Did you get that sales/marketing phone call from Nextcloud to sell you their enterprise subscriptions? |
Sorry for the late reply, I was away on vacation for a few weeks. Yes, they want to sell us the enterprise subscriptions for all those free users, indeed. We're discussing the further steps internally as we speak. Most probably, this will lead to our withdrawal from the provider signup program. I still cannot believe this and have some minimal hope that this is just a misunderstanding. If someone from Nextcloud (besides the sales team) does read this, please contact me. |
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Thank you very much @andristeiner for your feedback. This really confirms my supposition that they act the same with every Nextcloud partner provider. It is a big disappointment and we are also looking into alternative solutions and shutting down this service we provide for free. We will of course make sure to inform our users that this free service shutdown is solely due to wrong acting and non-cooperation from Nextcloud's side. |
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Hi everybody, I apologize for the confusion. Not every sales conversation might have gone perfect, Nextcloud has grown recently and not everybody in our team is fully aware of the simple signup program. And, of course, mis-understandings can happen. As I initiated the program and we emailed about it in the past, you could reach out to me about this directly. Anyhow, how I think we should approach it is quite simple and fair. By becoming a partner, you get to use our name and logo, and get access to Nextcloud Enterprise with support & features, for all your customers. That of course costs money for the paying customers. But then that is called business - you don't provide your service for free either, developers have to eat. The simple signup program, which would not cost money, would be going forward an (optional) marketing benefit of being a partner. For the users this is better too - we get quite some complaints, and this way, we can provide proper, priority support to those systems that have issues. If that works for you, reach out to me directly. For those for whom it does not work, that's fine, no hard feelings and sorry for any confusion we've caused. Greetings, PS will close the issue now, with this it should be resolved. |
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@jospoortvliet, that's not a reason to close the issue! Why not consider the option of using Ntfy like so many others have suggested? There's no reason for this notice, because there's no reason to have notifications go through Nextcloud's own servers. |
I do not understand how the first statement is the answer to the latter two. |
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I'm getting this message on a 2-user install since upgraded to 27.1.3 today. That looks like a bug in the check of the number of users... |
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@apio-sys If so, that's a different matter than this issue is covering. Would you mind either checking/asking on the Help Forums and/or opening a dedicated Issue? |
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Indeed a different issue. But interesting though pertaining to this subject. I temporarily lost connection to my OpenLDAP server and saw following errors in the logs : "CustomMessage":"Lost connection to LDAP server." That causes then the faire use message to pop-up. Once LDAP fixed again it disappears. |
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