LibreOffice Nag Notices

Occasionally when using LibreOffice I see a blue banner:

Help us make LibreOffice even better!

Included in the banner is a Get Involved button.

There is a similar banner:

Your donations support our worldwide community.

Included in the banner is a Donate button.

LibreOffice is free/libre software and is free in price. Perhaps an occasional nag notice is acceptable with something that is free in price. There also is a desire to encourage users to learn about and help with the project.

The nag notices are designed to trigger every 90 or 180 days. A three or six month nag notice is more palatable than a nag every instance, yet some users prefer a way to disable the notice, such as business users.

I found a related bug report.

The date stamps are stored in $HOME/.config/libreoffice/4/user/registrymodifications.xcu, in the LastTimeGetInvolvedShown and LastTimeDonateShown variables. The values are epoch dates.

The nag notices can be disabled.

To no avail I tried both of the following methods.

1. Close LibreOffice.
2. Launch a text editor.
3. Open $HOME/.config/libreoffice/4/user/registrymodifications.xcu.
4. Change both values to 0 (zero).

Or

1. Launch LibreOffice.
2. Select Tools->Options->LibreOffice->Advanced.
3. Select Open Expert Configuration.
4. Search for LastTime.
5. Change both values to 0 (zero).

Neither method succeeded. Based on viewing viewfrm.cxx in the source code and the original bug report, I created a global sledge hammer. In $BASEDIR/share/registry I created noinfobarnags.xcd:

    <?xml version="1.0"?>
    <oor:data xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:oor="http://openoffice.org/2001/registry">
      <dependency file="main" />
      <oor:component-data xmlns:install="http://openoffice.org/2004/installation" oor:name="Setup" oor:package="org.openoffice">
        <node oor:name="Product">
          <prop oor:name="LastTimeGetInvolvedShown" oor:op="fuse" oor:finalized="true">
            <value>0</value>
          </prop>
          <prop oor:name="LastTimeDonateShown" oor:op="fuse" oor:finalized="true">
            <value>0</value>
          </prop>
        </node>
      </oor:component-data>
    </oor:data>

With the sledge hammer I no longer see any occurrences of the values in my profile registrymodifications.xcu. Inspecting the values in the Expert Configuration dialog shows both values at zero.

Posted: November 19, 2019 Category: Usability Tagged: General

Next: Debian 10 Boot Spew

Previous: Corrupted Disk Redux