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NodeBB Development

Stay tuned here to hear more about new releases and features of NodeBB!

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  • Posts from the NodeBB Development Blog
    96 Topics
    778 Posts
    julianJ

    Occasionally, we will get asked whether there are any differences between our hosted service and the open source project.

    It is as though we are holding back some great features and only allowing our paying customers access them! Conversely, it could be assumed that because we are hosting the software for others, that we would somehow out of self-interest or for economic reasons, deliver an inferior version with limitations.

    I'd like to say upfront that this is not the case for NodeBB.

    When you use our hosted service, you receive the same great NodeBB software that you can get for free off of our GitHub repository.

    What we're selling is support, maintenance, upgrades, and peace of mind delivered by our world-class† support team.

    You definitely can host NodeBB on your own! We've strived for years to deliver a piece of software that runs lean and fast on minimal hardware, great docs (some contributed by other admins!) that help you get up to speed quickly, and a fantastic community that will help you if you get stuck.

    The reason I take this principled stand is simple — I think it's unfair when artificial limitations are placed on software just for the purpose of getting customers to pay more.

    We've seen all this time and time again:

    You can't install any plugin you want, just a select few from a small list You can only have X units (tickets, posts, etc) of whatever you're using You can only have X admins/owners You can't see any messages older than X days

    These limitations are all artificial, and serve to restrict the use of something to the bare minimum. Anything extra is — of course — available for the right price.

    We don't do that. We tell everybody that NodeBB is powerful enough to run huge communities, and we stand by it. We tell everybody that NodeBB is flexible enough to look and function however you want, and we stand by it.

    These are the real limitations we impose on our hosting service:

    Hard drive space for uploads are imposed by our upstream provider and are set, though we are happy to add additional drive volumes for a fee) We have soft "pageview" limits that any user on our hosting can exceed (in fact, many do). We set them purely as a benchmark for the point at which your NodeBB may slow down depending on the type of load that you get, and encourage dialogue to make sure that you're on the right plan (server resources, etc.) We do not allow shell access for security reasons (and if you needed it, you probably could self-host)

    So please do rest assured when I and others tell you that what you see is what you get. No more, no less. I'd rather everybody get to use the best of NodeBB, instead of serving a special feature-reduced version for others.

    † I'm going to go out on limb here and say that we're probably the most qualified people to maintain NodeBB. Feel free to disagree 😉

  • You have a cool idea about NodeBB? Post it here.

    798 Topics
    5k Posts
    crazycellsC

    when the forum is used as PWA, there is no easy way to navigate between pages...

    Yesterday, I was reading a post on the forum that mentioned another topic, I have encountered an issue when attempting to return to the original post. So, after reading the linked topic, I had to go to categories page and retrace my steps to locate the topic I was reading initially...

    Although this can be achieved by page control arrows on destop and mobile browsers, there is no easy way to achieve this on PWA... so I propose adding some page control buttons that appear at the bottom of the page when scrolled up. (maybe it can be integrated to post navigation bar but I believe those buttons should appear in all pages, not only in topics)

    Here is just a suggestion to distinguish them from other arrows...

    IMG_0029 copy.jpeg

    alternatively the arrows or rewind icons that YouTube uses can be used:

    IMG_0030.jpg

  • Found a bug? Why not make a bug report here?
    1k Topics
    7k Posts
    crazycellsC

    @solmak

    Thank you for spending time on this, that was fast!

    he is quite speedy :rofl: @baris is known to create a new plugin in 3 minutes of it being discussed in the forum... lol

    Link Preview Image How? · Issue #2 · NodeBB/nodebb-plugin-best-posts

    How did you make a plugin in 3 minutes?

    favicon

    GitHub (github.com)

  • Focused discussion related to ActivityPub integration in NodeBB

    27 Topics
    232 Posts

    @julian
    @angusmcleod
    I am excited for it and what we can accomplish this year. Thanks for initiating this 😊👍

  • Help Translate NodeBB
  • Onehundredfreebooks custom theme

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    P

    Congratulations to http://community.onehundredfreebooks.com - our very first customer for our premium hosting platform (which just entered closed Beta).

    We created a custom theme for him as well! 🙂 We're pretty excited to see this forum grow~

  • Woo new milestone

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    julianJ

    Thanks @quahfamili! Glad to put a marker on it, even if development is always continuous 🙂

  • Ajaxify

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    julianJ

    Hey @RefinedSoftware, @caske33,

    There's an ongoing issue right now with plugins not being "ajaxified" in the admin panel. "Ajaxifying" is our pet name for our shorthand method that loads pages in NodeBB (since it is a one-page application, it doesn't truly do a page reload when you click links).

    Give it a try, if you'd like:

    Open up your console (hit F12), and navigate to the console tab, if it is not open already Type in ajaxify.go('users/online') ;

    Also, it looks like I found a bug with the Skype Emoji -- darnit.

  • Test

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    Amazing forum engine

  • 0 Votes
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    barisB

    Hi @sbdubz, our indiegogo campaign was over in August. We do have some unit tests but they do not cover the whole codebase yet. With that said NodeBB is already pretty stable and we usually get onto bugs that crop up within the same day.

  • Code style

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    barisB

    I think you are referring to vars like

    https://github.com/designcreateplay/NodeBB/blob/master/src/categories.js#L47

    If that's the case you are right those can and probably should move into the functions where they are used.

  • User feedback issues

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    julianJ

    Responded here

  • Setting up a NodeBB forum for dummies

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    julianJ

    Thanks to @psychobunny for the excellent guide!

    Setting up a NodeBB Forum “for Dummies”

  • Prerequisites to development

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    julianJ

    Heroku allows developers to run small instances for free (even their redis add-on is free), but if your site becomes popular, you will have to pay.

    We have a guide to setting up NodeBB on Heroku in our wiki.

  • Installing NodeBB on joyents smartos solaris

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    X

    great forum!!

  • upgrade before setup

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    sdfdsfsdfsdf

    list item

    list item

  • NodeBB v0.0.7 released

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    julianJ

    We saw! Thanks for the write-up 🙂

    The more press the better (Y)

  • Dependency installer on first start

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    ToyzT

    I was working on my NodeBB server last night and noticed how actually annoying it is to set up, so not anyone can simply set it up...

    So I started to ponder if I can make the process faster and easier for everyone to use and I came up with the following idea which I was able to get working on a NodeBB install integrated right into NodeBB which basically took all the methods and checked.

    So What i did was the actual following:

    Updated App.JS to support require.Resolve() method to check for all needed files Made a basic requirements reader that was able to read the NodeBB package info
    *Made it so it test each module to see if it existed on every start up, checked for updates and updated if needed or downloaded them and installed them if needed

    Doing this took out about 15 to 20 mins of work for a none NodeJS user so all someone know would have to do is basically run

    Node App

    Without needing all the other things such as

    Node install

    Or anything of the sorts, i am working on also making it get it's other needed resources like redis and a few others

    Will Post source to my github when I get home from work

  • My smf to NodeBB migration thread

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    Hey,

    I'll post some stuff here regarding my migration from SMF 2.x forum to NodeBB. I've had a forum for ~4 years and it's about time I revamped it. I'm a huge node.js and redis fan, so having a forum written in php is blasphemous.

    thanks for all the effort you've put into this!:)

  • Very interesting project

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    julianJ

    seems like 0.7 to be out soon!!!

    Soon... soon... :S

  • Mobile issues

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    P

    thanks for the bug reports @quahfamili - please feel free to add issues on our bug tracker here:

    https://github.com/designcreateplay/NodeBB/issues

    and we'll sort em out as soon as we can - thanks!

  • Longer usernames

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    I
    Longer Usernames

    I submitted a pull request on the NodeBB github. Check it out!

  • Campaign is over what is next

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    julianJ

    Hey quahfamili,

    Sorry about the delay -- and thank you very much for your contributions!

    Now that the campaign is over, we don't intend on stopping development. We're aiming to push more stability fixes and aim to be "feature-complete" within the next couple weeks.

    Perks will be fulfilled as soon as possible, although fulfilment of the SaaS hosting perks will have to wait until the SaaS portal itself is up and running.

  • V

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    julianJ

    I hope you continue working on it. It can be really huge. 🙂

    Thanks! We're really proud of what we've done so far. If there's anything you need, please let us know, and we'll try to accomodate!