Re: [tor-bugs] #32568 [Internal Services/Service - nextcloud]: nextcloud collaborative "pad" synchronization breaks down with multiple users

[Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki]

#32568: nextcloud collaborative "pad" synchronization breaks down with multiple
users
-+-
 Reporter:  anarcat  |  Owner:
 |  nextcloud-admin@…
 Type:  defect   | Status:  new
 Priority:  Medium   |  Milestone:
Component:  Internal Services/Service -  |Version:
  nextcloud  |
 Severity:  Normal   | Resolution:
 Keywords:   |  Actual Points:
Parent ID:   | Points:
 Reviewer:   |Sponsor:
-+-

Comment (by gaba):

 We are using nextcloud to archive documents, to save list of ideas for
 grants, for keeping track of broad goals for sponsors and I'm using it for
 calendar. We are not wasting anything setting up nextcloud. About grant
 writing it is ok if people use google doc until onlyoffice is usable.

--
Ticket URL: 
Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki 
The Tor Project: anonymity online
___
tor-bugs mailing list
tor-bugs@lists.torproject.org
https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-bugs

Re: [tor-bugs] #32568 [Internal Services/Service - nextcloud]: nextcloud collaborative "pad" synchronization breaks down with multiple users

[Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki]

#32568: nextcloud collaborative "pad" synchronization breaks down with multiple
users
-+-
 Reporter:  anarcat  |  Owner:
 |  nextcloud-admin@…
 Type:  defect   | Status:  new
 Priority:  Medium   |  Milestone:
Component:  Internal Services/Service -  |Version:
  nextcloud  |
 Severity:  Normal   | Resolution:
 Keywords:   |  Actual Points:
Parent ID:   | Points:
 Reviewer:   |Sponsor:
-+-

Comment (by anarcat):

 And just to make sure the distinction is clear, i'll reiterate there are
 two collaborative editing apps in Nextcloud: the "Text app" and the
 "Onlyoffice app":

  * '''Text app''': Etherpad replacement. Simple, collaborative text
 editor. Has known problems with large (10+?) groups. Subjet of this bug
 report.
  * '''Onlyoffice app''': Google Docs replacement. More complex and slower.
 Large group collaborative capabilities unknown.

 In the "create document" drop down:

 [[Image(snap-2020.01.09-13.00.13.png)]]

 The '''New text document''' option starts the '''Text app''', but the
 '''Document''', '''Spreadsheet''' and '''Presentation''' menus start the
 '''Onlyoffice app'''.

 I figure it was worth clarifying that. I think Onlyoffice should be tested
 more, especially with large groups, but it should at least be used more
 extensively for collaborative documents made with smaller groups...

--
Ticket URL: 
Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki 
The Tor Project: anonymity online
___
tor-bugs mailing list
tor-bugs@lists.torproject.org
https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-bugs

Re: [tor-bugs] #32568 [Internal Services/Service - nextcloud]: nextcloud collaborative "pad" synchronization breaks down with multiple users

[Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki]

#32568: nextcloud collaborative "pad" synchronization breaks down with multiple
users
-+-
 Reporter:  anarcat  |  Owner:
 |  nextcloud-admin@…
 Type:  defect   | Status:  new
 Priority:  Medium   |  Milestone:
Component:  Internal Services/Service -  |Version:
  nextcloud  |
 Severity:  Normal   | Resolution:
 Keywords:   |  Actual Points:
Parent ID:   | Points:
 Reviewer:   |Sponsor:
-+-
Changes (by anarcat):

 * Attachment "snap-2020.01.09-13.00.13.png" added.


--
Ticket URL: 
Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki 
The Tor Project: anonymity online
___
tor-bugs mailing list
tor-bugs@lists.torproject.org
https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-bugs

Re: [tor-bugs] #32568 [Internal Services/Service - nextcloud]: nextcloud collaborative "pad" synchronization breaks down with multiple users

[Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki]

#32568: nextcloud collaborative "pad" synchronization breaks down with multiple
users
-+-
 Reporter:  anarcat  |  Owner:
 |  nextcloud-admin@…
 Type:  defect   | Status:  new
 Priority:  Medium   |  Milestone:
Component:  Internal Services/Service -  |Version:
  nextcloud  |
 Severity:  Normal   | Resolution:
 Keywords:   |  Actual Points:
Parent ID:   | Points:
 Reviewer:   |Sponsor:
-+-

Comment (by anarcat):

 So far it seems that people have reverted back to using Google Docs for
 writing letters and proposals which makes me both sad and scared.

 Sad, because friends are working hard to make Nextcloud work for us and
 are wondering if they are wasting their time.

 Scared, because we're putting our most sensitive data in the most
 sophisticated surveillance machine ever built by humanity.

 We need to figure this out. I think one thing we should try is to
 elaborate on the various pain points we have with each platform, and
 whether they can be resonably resolved.

 For example, we had a bad experience with the "text app" when
 collaborating with a large group. But we have made the same experience
 with the Only Office app. Maybe we could try that first?

 I would also suggest that we try to write our documents in Nextcloud by
 default, and only revert to Google Docs when things start to fail.

 But I understand that people take the easy way for now: after all, we have
 a job to do and that is not to serve as guinea pigs and beta-test every
 free software app out there. ;)

--
Ticket URL: 
Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki 
The Tor Project: anonymity online
___
tor-bugs mailing list
tor-bugs@lists.torproject.org
https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-bugs

Re: [tor-bugs] #32568 [Internal Services/Service - nextcloud]: nextcloud collaborative "pad" synchronization breaks down with multiple users

[Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki]

#32568: nextcloud collaborative "pad" synchronization breaks down with multiple
users
-+-
 Reporter:  anarcat  |  Owner:
 |  nextcloud-admin@…
 Type:  defect   | Status:  new
 Priority:  Medium   |  Milestone:
Component:  Internal Services/Service -  |Version:
  nextcloud  |
 Severity:  Normal   | Resolution:
 Keywords:   |  Actual Points:
Parent ID:   | Points:
 Reviewer:   |Sponsor:
-+-

Comment (by gaba):

 Yes. I see the problem with using owncloud and may not be clear for people
 and we lose data that we do not want to lose.

 I agree about moving any agenda/notes for meetings to pad.riseup.net and
 periodically archive them in nc.torproject.net if we want to save old
 notes. Once they fix the text app then we can consider if we move there or
 not. For now we can continue using pad.riseup.net as we use for network
 and anti-censorship team meetings.

--
Ticket URL: 
Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki 
The Tor Project: anonymity online
___
tor-bugs mailing list
tor-bugs@lists.torproject.org
https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-bugs

Re: [tor-bugs] #32568 [Internal Services/Service - nextcloud]: nextcloud collaborative "pad" synchronization breaks down with multiple users

[Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki]

#32568: nextcloud collaborative "pad" synchronization breaks down with multiple
users
-+-
 Reporter:  anarcat  |  Owner:
 |  nextcloud-admin@…
 Type:  defect   | Status:  new
 Priority:  Medium   |  Milestone:
Component:  Internal Services/Service -  |Version:
  nextcloud  |
 Severity:  Normal   | Resolution:
 Keywords:   |  Actual Points:
Parent ID:   | Points:
 Reviewer:   |Sponsor:
-+-

Comment (by anarcat):

 also, thanks gaba and sysrqb for the diagnostics, that's super useful! :)
 in particular, thanks gaba for the detective work in the text app issue
 queue. it sure looks like there's a race condition in the code that can
 get triggered when multiple people edit at the same time. and since they
 found it, there's a good chance *that* specific issue gets fixed...

 so maybe this is just a matter of "wait and see" (ie. use pad.riseup.net
 for a bit longer) while they fix their things...

--
Ticket URL: 
Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki 
The Tor Project: anonymity online
___
tor-bugs mailing list
tor-bugs@lists.torproject.org
https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-bugs

Re: [tor-bugs] #32568 [Internal Services/Service - nextcloud]: nextcloud collaborative "pad" synchronization breaks down with multiple users

[Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki]

#32568: nextcloud collaborative "pad" synchronization breaks down with multiple
users
-+-
 Reporter:  anarcat  |  Owner:
 |  nextcloud-admin@…
 Type:  defect   | Status:  new
 Priority:  Medium   |  Milestone:
Component:  Internal Services/Service -  |Version:
  nextcloud  |
 Severity:  Normal   | Resolution:
 Keywords:   |  Actual Points:
Parent ID:   | Points:
 Reviewer:   |Sponsor:
-+-

Comment (by anarcat):

 i just had a quick chat with micah about this, and here's a summary...

 for the sake of clarity, I'll start by naming things, because it's hard
 and i think a source of confusion:

  * '''onlyoffice''': the Nextcloud collaborative editor with support for
 Word and Excel documents, kind of like Google docs ('''installed on
 nc.tpo''')
  * '''etherpad app''', '''ownpad''': the
 [https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/ownpad Nextcloud Etherpad app] that
 bridges Nextcloud with an existing Etherpad lite instance ('''not
 installed on nc.tpo''')
  * '''markdown app''', '''text app''': the
 [https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/text Nextcloud Text app] that allows
 collaborative editing of text documents ('''installed on nc.tpo''').

 Let's take those one by one...

 == The text app

 The Text app we are having problems with in the meetings is built on top
 of [https://prosemirror.net/ Prosemirror], one of *many*
 [https://anarc.at/blog/2018-06-26-collaborative-editors-history/
 collaborative editors I have found in a previous research last year], and
 [https://anarc.at/blog/2018-06-26-collaborative-editors-history/ tiptap],
 a rich text editor built on top of Prosemirror. This app is
 [https://nextcloud.com/blog/nextcloud-introduces-collaborative-rich-text-
 editor/ fairly recent] (june 2019) and shipws with NC 17 by default.

 Micah told me the problems we are seeing are known, and others have
 suffered the same problems. He suspects the NC people haven't yet made the
 app scale to tens of users like we've seen in the vegas and metrics
 meetings (or at least, more than 10). This would confirm sysrqb's
 observations that it would fall apart under load. It works fine for a
 couple people, with some quirks, like a small scratch pad, but not so well
 for larger groups.

 There might be performance tweaks we could do in Nginx or elsewhere to fix
 the issue sysrqb observed.

 == The etherpad app

 This app is not yet installed on our instance, but could be. It was (or
 still is?) installed on nc.riseup.net but because Riseup's etherpad
 instance expires documents after a while, this led to data loss as the
 files disappeared from NC as well.

 So while we ''could'' deploy that app in our instance, it might lead to
 the same problem as there's no obvious marker that a pad will be removed
 in the NC UI. There is, of course, a huge warning in the pad itself when
 you first open it, but people forget about this all the time.

 If we use it only for ephemeral stuff like the vegas meeting notes, maybe
 that would be alright, but I would still be worried that people would use
 it for other things and lose data.

 Maybe we could just use Riseup's pad service for our meetings? Do we
 absolutely need this to be integrated in Nextcloud? If so we would have
 '''three''' different collaborative editors in nextcloud, which doesn't
 seem very reasonable to me...

 Alternatively, can't we just use meetbot to take minutes in meetings? :)

 == The onlyoffice app

 We *could* use the OnlyOffice app for meetings. We haven't tried that in a
 large scale yet, as far as I know. It might have exactly the same problems
 as the text app, maybe even worse because onlyoffice is much heavier. It
 would be worth a try, however.

 == TL;DR:

 Known issue. Needs debugging or we could just use pad.riseup.net or
 meetbot or onlyoffice for meetings.

--
Ticket URL: 
Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki 
The Tor Project: anonymity online
___
tor-bugs mailing list
tor-bugs@lists.torproject.org
https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-bugs

Re: [tor-bugs] #32568 [Internal Services/Service - nextcloud]: nextcloud collaborative "pad" synchronization breaks down with multiple users

[Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki]

#32568: nextcloud collaborative "pad" synchronization breaks down with multiple
users
-+-
 Reporter:  anarcat  |  Owner:
 |  nextcloud-admin@…
 Type:  defect   | Status:  new
 Priority:  Medium   |  Milestone:
Component:  Internal Services/Service -  |Version:
  nextcloud  |
 Severity:  Normal   | Resolution:
 Keywords:   |  Actual Points:
Parent ID:   | Points:
 Reviewer:   |Sponsor:
-+-

Comment (by gaba):

 It may be related to this bug in the text app:

 https://github.com/nextcloud/text/issues/331

--
Ticket URL: 
Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki 
The Tor Project: anonymity online
___
tor-bugs mailing list
tor-bugs@lists.torproject.org
https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-bugs

Re: [tor-bugs] #32568 [Internal Services/Service - nextcloud]: nextcloud collaborative "pad" synchronization breaks down with multiple users

[Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki]

#32568: nextcloud collaborative "pad" synchronization breaks down with multiple
users
-+-
 Reporter:  anarcat  |  Owner:
 |  nextcloud-admin@…
 Type:  defect   | Status:  new
 Priority:  Medium   |  Milestone:
Component:  Internal Services/Service -  |Version:
  nextcloud  |
 Severity:  Normal   | Resolution:
 Keywords:   |  Actual Points:
Parent ID:   | Points:
 Reviewer:   |Sponsor:
-+-

Comment (by gaba):

 I think one problem is that we are using this app in nc.torproject.net
 right now:

 https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/text


 and we should consider using a pad instead:

 https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/ownpad

--
Ticket URL: 
Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki 
The Tor Project: anonymity online
___
tor-bugs mailing list
tor-bugs@lists.torproject.org
https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-bugs

Re: [tor-bugs] #32568 [Internal Services/Service - nextcloud]: nextcloud collaborative "pad" synchronization breaks down with multiple users

[Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki]

#32568: nextcloud collaborative "pad" synchronization breaks down with multiple
users
-+-
 Reporter:  anarcat  |  Owner:
 |  nextcloud-admin@…
 Type:  defect   | Status:  new
 Priority:  Medium   |  Milestone:
Component:  Internal Services/Service -  |Version:
  nextcloud  |
 Severity:  Normal   | Resolution:
 Keywords:   |  Actual Points:
Parent ID:   | Points:
 Reviewer:   |Sponsor:
-+-

Comment (by sysrqb):

 As one datapoint, I open devtools on the page and whenever I modified the
 page I saw there was a xhr POST request initiated to
 `https://nc.torproject.net/apps/text/public/session/push`. Interestingly,
 it seems like they all timed out (which could explain the lack of
 synchronization across browsers). I don't know if that was simply a local
 issue, or if that was experienced by everyone using the pad, as well.

 Currently, when I edit the document I see the same request initiated but
 now there is a "412: Precondition Failed" response.

--
Ticket URL: 
Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki 
The Tor Project: anonymity online
___
tor-bugs mailing list
tor-bugs@lists.torproject.org
https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-bugs

[tor-bugs] #32568 [Internal Services/Service - nextcloud]: nextcloud collaborative "pad" synchronization breaks down with multiple users

[Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki]

#32568: nextcloud collaborative "pad" synchronization breaks down with multiple
users
-+-
 Reporter:  anarcat  |  Owner:  nextcloud-
 |  admin@…
 Type:  defect   | Status:  new
 Priority:  Medium   |  Milestone:
Component:  Internal Services/Service -  |Version:
  nextcloud  |
 Severity:  Normal   |   Keywords:
Actual Points:   |  Parent ID:
   Points:   |   Reviewer:
  Sponsor:   |
-+-
 Today, in both the metrics and vegas meetings, we had problems using the
 "nextcloud pad", that collaborative, WYSIWYG, "markdown" text editor.
 We're trying to use this as a replacement for Storm's Etherpad
 installation and it worked the last meeting.

 But now we were over 12 people in the pad and it didn't work so well. The
 main problem is synchronization, e.g. one user would "strikethrough" some
 text but others wouldn't see the style change. This is particularly
 critical in Vegas meetings as we use that style information to carry
 information about how the meeting should proceed.

 There are also issues scrolling around the content using cursor keys (e.g.
 pgdown jumps to the end of the document instead of one page down), but
 that's probably unrelated.

--
Ticket URL: 
Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki 
The Tor Project: anonymity online
___
tor-bugs mailing list
tor-bugs@lists.torproject.org
https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-bugs