I've been running a MM server for about three years. It's been great, though lately I've been a little worried about it. They added stuff like in-app marketing to admins, under the guise of being helpful — you know, teaching us about exciting new premium features — oh, and by the way, you can't turn it off. When apps start to do things like that, it feels like more drastic monetization strategies can't be far behind.
Mattermost CEO here, sorry to hear you had a negative experience with the admin adviser. Thank you for the feedback.
Mattermost Team Edition is designed for teams (I.e. groups of people that work together and trust each other) and there were issues when Team Edition was deployed to unintended use cases—-like hosting hundreds of users, saving millions of posts, or other scenarios outside of what a team was meant to do.
Admin adviser was meant to help admins who hit those scenarios, and some of the advisory in scenarios Team Edition wasn’t intended to handle was for the Enterprise Edition. It sounds like that came across the wrong way and we should revisit.
Note: I think a fair chunk of admin advisor was paused a while ago. Not sure how much is running these days. Regardless we should take a look.
I run a fairly big instance with hundreds of users. We wanted to support/promote a more free/libre alternative to Slack, but you are basically saying we should not use Mattermost?
(I think that channel deletion was a concern at some point, but archiving mitigates it, we are happy users in general)
We offer a non-profit license for open-source projects [0] with special nonprofit pricing. We also plan to move the System Permissions Scheme into the open source Team Edition with the 6.0 release on September 15 [1].
Thanks for being a user, feedback is always welcome!
Yeah we (a University CS department) had the same experience. We've run Mattermost for a number of years but the advisor bar was a bit of a blunt instrument. The only way to dismiss it permanently was to share your email address with their sales team and consent to being contacted. We'd have had a similarly unfavourable view if Nginx, Ubuntu or Thunderbird done the same thing.
And now when you enter the system console, the very first thing you so is the Upgrade to Enterprise Edition CTA button. It concerns me that they'll keep pushing free (OSS) users towards the paid product. They've eroded some of our trust and given the choice we'd probably go in another direction in the future.
Really appreciate your feedback. We had intended to pause the admin advisor notifications couple of months ago but due to an intended bug some of the messages are still coming through. We've queued an update to pause them in the next release (v5.38). [1]
The original vision for the admin advisor notification feature was to guide administrators through proper activation and configuration of the system as the needs of their user base evolves, with some additional capabilities in the Enterprise offering. However, based on the feedback we received, it was evident that the experience felt spammy with limited value which was not the intent, negatively impacting the trust with our community. Hence why we've decided to pause admin advisor notifications at this time.
