Why is the official Nextcloud help community so combative? I’ve been working with Nextcloud for about 3 months in various configurations and every time I’ve had to seek assistance there it has been an unwelcome experience.

Even when I say something to the effect of “I’m having this problem with “X”, I think I’ve done something wrong in configuration, where should I look first?” I almost always get a sharp response at best, and most often a response akin to: “You’re wrong, that problem doesn’t exist. I’ve tested it on my server.” This latest time, I’ve found a problem in 3 different installations, 2 other users confirmed they also experience the problem and my thread is just hijacked with “Well we don’t see it, so it doesn’t exist.” and “You should have told us “X” if you wanted any real help.” or “Why are you asking here instead of somewhere else?” Every time I post there, I find myself backing away cautiously while vitreol just erupts.

I’m not one of the users who just willy nilly starts posting questions everywhere - I go through lot of self-help effort, investigating, researching and looking at official documentation and searching online to try and figure it out myself before I post, but I’m always faced with a “You’re so stupid for posting here.” vibe over there. I’ve experienced this same or similar behavior over at least a half a dozen attempts to get help with something. In my 20+ years of hosting experience, participating in countless communities, I have never experienced such an unwelcoming, hostile “help community”. What’s the deal?

  • moonpiedumplings@programming.devEnglish
    61·
    20 days ago

    If this is the thread you are referring to, this is far from “vitreol” or being “combatative”. You said it yourself, there are two others users testing and were able to reproduce your issue. And the person who was unable to reproduce your issue is still being helpful, because we confirm that their specific setup (powerful server + ubuntu snap) doesn’t encounter this issue. Of course they are not going to offer any further troubleshooting advice, what can they do? They aren’t encountering the issue so they can’t really help you in the hands on way the other commenters are. So instead they pointed you to some other places you could ask for further troubleshooting. “I can’t help you” is very, very different than “fuck off!”.

    Look, I get it. You’re tired, and probably frustrated. Just take a break or something. It’s clear that making this post didn’t advance your goal of troubleshooting this issue.

    Now, let me take a crack at it. Nextcloud is one of like 3 software that I know off, off the top of my head that can encounter performance issues when it is deployed in a manner that doesn’t include an in memory cache of some sort. It looks like you were trying to install redis here, although I don’t know how far you got, or if this was even the same nextcloud setup?

    But many people frequently encounter performance issues with the manual install, that they don’t encounter with “distributions” of Nextcloud that include Redis or other performance optimizations like the docker-AIO installl… or the Snap version that the person who wasn’t encountering the issue used. So yes. Knowing that someone doesn’t encounter an issue is useful information to me.

    Can you confirm what deployment method your hosting provider is using for nextcloud? Both here and in the original thread, that would isolate a lot of variables, and it would allow people to give you more precise advice on debugging the service, since debugging a docker or snap version will be different from debugging a raw LAMP stack install. Right now, we are essentially flying blind, so it’s no wonder that no progress has been made.

    have you considered contacting hosting support?

    Of course not. I came to the available discussion forum to investigate a situation which may or may not be a flaw, and is clearly not a hosting company’s responsibility. Besides the fact that they would likely tell me exactly that if I get a response at all, I always explore all other avenues before opening tickets and GitHub issues.

    Lmao. You pay them for a service of seamless nextcloud, and that includes support. But to be blunt, we can’t really help you if we don’t know what the hosting provider is doing.

    If this is a performance optimization problem, you may not have the privileges on the server you would need to finetune nextcloud in order to fix this.

    If this is a bug, you can’t really see granular logs from the nextcloud host, same thing.

    Idk what to tell you. You are trying to manage managed nextcloud like it is selfhosted nextcloud and you are getting frustrated when people tell you that you might not have the under the hood access needed to fix what you want to fix.

    • JupiterSnarl@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      11·
      19 days ago

      Wow. You went to another forum, dug up what you think is evidence to use against me, dug up other outdated posts in my history, completely out of context and that were not even related to what I’m working with at the moment, and decided to dump on me here. You have completely twisted (or misunderstood?) reality to make yourself feel superior and continue to scold n00bs on the internet, and attempted to paint me across the street here. Then you made up a bunch of things that arent happening to defend your stance:

      You are trying to manage managed nextcloud like it is selfhosted nextcloud (No. I know exactly what I’m working with. I was asking if this is “normal” for this software to a community that would know, before I waste another dozen hours trying to seek a solution.) and you are getting frustrated when people tell you that you might not have the under the hood access needed to fix what you want to fix. (Wrong. I’m frustrated with the attitude like yours that assumes that every person who asks a question is a n00b idiot and has no idea what we’re asking about.)

      Thanks for proving my point so well.

      • moonpiedumplings@programming.devEnglish
        1·
        19 days ago

        Okay, it’s good to know that your work with redis is on a different setup.

        Can you confirm what version of nextcloud and collobra is being deployed? Another user in the original thread mentioned that they stopped encountering this issue after cp-25.04.8-1.

        It could be a bug that has been patched, but only after a specific version.