after using Rocket.chat for a few days we summarised the feedback from the community and our administrative feedback for ease of reading and to let us retrieve them later during the next test run(s).

The feedbacks from the community

The community reported back that with adding more and more channels it felt way less organized due to the web and app behaviour. Even though Rocket.chat comes with native mobile apps, the community found them lacking in terms of QoL functionalities and carrying more bugs than the web interface

Overall, the community deemed Rocket.chat to be way too deep into the enterprise and soulless corporate side of things, more than being a community tool, while also preferring the previous test (Discourse) instead of the current test. Generally speaking, the community felt that the best solution wasn't probably a single app or service but rather a combination of at least two services, one for community building and one for quick communication (textual, voice, video, this last not being a dealbreaker)

The feedbacks from the staff

What we found positive from the behind-the-curtains side of things is that Rocket.chat is self hostable, not too difficult to maintain and easy to setup and quite lightweight infrastructurally.

What really didn't click with us (or clicked negatively) is that most of the settings are paywalled behind a subscription and said subscription has to be paid even for self-hosted instance. The first setup require mandatorily a subscription/registration to the starter plan (free up to 50 users), with no way to skip it. The community plan (which we're currently using after downgrading) allow us to have only 5 plugin/integrations; we installed Giphy and Jitsi during the test run and many others are just proprietary/big tech plugins. We couldn't enable push notifications for our instance because Rocket.chat requires a subscription to use the Rocket.chat official gateway even for self hosted instances OR let you build a custom android/iOS app (whitelabeling) which is a huge tech commitment;

Generally speaking, the overall UX is more similar to Matrix (Element, etc.) than Slack and seems being more enterprise oriented than community oriented, differently from the previous test (Discourse)

Next steps

In the days ahed we will proceed to the next test run, that will be described in the next blog post.

Stay tuned for more updates

#Discord #RocketChat

The Gamers' Tavern is a cozy place where you can rest and have fun with others gamers. This community main goal is to provide everyone a cozy and safe place to keep in touch and play together.

A week and some more has passed since we announced the grand opening of our Discourse instance and we collected all of the precious feedbacks from the community, you can read about them in this post

Having said that, we wanted to let you know that soon we will start setting up Rocket.chat for our next test run.

It will take around two to three days to set up everything ready in a Production-ready way and another two to three days to let us configure the “behind the curtains” stuff, like permissions, categories, etc.

One of our goals in those days will be to allow you all the login through our SSO Page so you won’t need to register again for yet another service.

Regarding Discourse, it will be shut down for the Rocket.chat test, to let us monitor precisely the hardware usage, but won’t be deleted, meaning that all of your posts, settings, etc. will still be there in case should you choose to continue The Gamers’ Tavern’s adventure in this tool as the main community outlet.

Take this with a grain of salt, but we will shut down Discourse this Sunday (February, 22) and with some luck on our side we will let you access Rocket.chat in the first half of the next week (let’s say Wednesday)

As always, we thank all the member of the community for being amazing!

Should you have questions feel free to ask any member of the Staff

#Discord #RocketChat

The Gamers' Tavern is a cozy place where you can rest and have fun with others gamers. This community main goal is to provide everyone a cozy and safe place to keep in touch and play together.