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.
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.