Feature Requests

@mschwartz Important feedback.

On one point that interest's me the most because it's a big deal and a universal problem-challenge for any site admin, owners and operators.

Getting users to sign up!

I would view this as a platform agnostic problem

That does not preclude NodeBB from attempting to enhance signing up users, but the impetus that makes a user sign up to any site is not clear cut and involves a whole range of factors beyond simply the platform and the UI/UX.

My concluding comment is this singular point of feedback would benefit the whole and is so deserving it's own topic and here is one I created https://community.nodebb.org/topic/17636/why-do-users-sign-up

+1 for this feature idea, I think the checkboxes are just irritating and unnecessary if a user didn't intend to select multiple items.
I'm referring primarily to the Unread section. The common practice is probably: read interesting unread topics and then mark all the rest as read at once. Multi-select with checkboxes is nice but should be an option in my opinion.

Note that HEIF is not a royalty-free codec, but requires one to license HEVC patents from one of the few existing patent pools (it's free for non-commercial use though). So we'll probably have to wait until 2036 (when the patents expire) before it stops being an "experimental" feature in sharp.

The royalty-free web replacement is AVIF - which is AV1 (instead of HEVC) in HEIF container, which is now supported everywhere but Edge (apparently MS is waiting for some licensing details to clear up, but it was added behind a flag recently. Presumably again issues with patents potentially covering the HEIF container too) and of course IE.

It'd be possible to support WebP properly though - it's supported basically everywhere but IE and does offer better compression, but has worse support outside of browsers unfortunately.

Also, probably before HEIF becomes usable for OSS (thanks again, patents!), we'll see a push for JPEG XL - currently Apple and Adobe are definitely on board, and Mozilla is experimenting with support. The only blocker is Chrome, but it seems the competition is forcing them to reconsider their stance. Aside from great compression (at least comparable to AVIF, seems to depend on benchmark which one is better both in speed and size. It does offer by far the best lossless compression too), JXL supports lossless recompression of traditional JPEG images (that is - it doesn't affect their quality even a bit, while decreasing their size by around 20%), and has some additional nice features that AVIF lacks (progressive decoding for one).
AVIF does have better animation support, being based on a video codec and all (though JXL does support animations too, AVIF is just better at compressing them).

I'd honestly consider adding WebP support for now - adding it to default allowed extensions, allowed image types and possibly adding an option to convert avatars to WebP (like there currently is for PNG).

Ideally, I think NodeBB should support hosting multiple formats (using <picture> where possible to let the browser choose), which would allow for easier transition as we're slowly getting new, better, formats, but that'd require quite a bit more work 🙂

Yes I know, I was just submitting the idea for those for who CSS is complicated not to impose it, but you do as you want 🙂

Far be it for me to agree with Brazzerstop,
But sometimes Less is more.
If people want to view the forum they can come here!

@crazycells Yes, that's the idea... although to ensure that existing mentions don't stop working, I will probably need to convert them all via upgrade script 😬 That's going to be a long-running one

@crazycells post queue isn't accessible to spiders afaik.

@crazycells yup.
You can find integration docs here (tl;dr you need to implement WOPI protocol for file access. Which will also work for most other web-based document editors, since that's basically the industry standard. OnlyOffice offers their own API as an alternative, but also supports WOPI. You can find an example server in Node here)

Install docs are here - from my understanding their primary distribution method is docker, but they do offer native packages if you prefer (looking at you Discourse with your docker-only yet for some reason linux-only installation using bash scripts)

It is different than pinning a topic to a category, it essentially puts an important message in a pinned message area so it is easy to find/reference it later. Check slack/discord for an example.

@phenomlab thanks for your input, i have done it with custom html, css and js

If anyone can use this, here you go. NodeBB, Redis & Python Script are all running on the same server. Please use the built in ACL to access the Redis database.

user mastodon +hgetall +zrange ~* on >PASSWORD

Link Preview Image Frank / nodebb_post_to_mastodon · GitLab

GitLab.com

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GitLab (gitlab.com)

@brazzerstop can you share link to your forum so I can get idea of format and number of posts?
I think can write widget to read all posts, and re-order them.
I did a small test of this, with the idea that just admin has access to view widget, with click to sort button.

Technical thoughts:
What is possible is to read all topicd or posts with write API, e.g.
https://community.nodebb.org/api/v3/posts/{pid}
delete them, sort, then rewrite
But its not best method because new post ids are made.
I have been wondering whether a bubble sort routine working directly on the database post number field might work. Saves re-writing records, only swapping that field.
Up till now Ive never managed to get direct Mongo API calls working.
The NodeBB API however is quite easy to use

Link Preview Image ability to search chat messages · Issue #11850 · NodeBB/NodeBB

Node.js based forum software built for the modern web - ability to search chat messages · Issue #11850 · NodeBB/NodeBB

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GitHub (github.com)

looks good.  impatiently waiting for v3.3.0 now =;^)  thank you.

@baris 👍

Cool, I can't remember where or if but I'm sure I suggested this a long time ago so I was delighted to see. Which means I think it should be a UI behaviour in core. 🙂

I've tweaked it to double click, it differentiates the actions of what UI single clicks are reserved for, buttons/links. It's also easy to trigger it by mistake with a single click configuration.

How I really envisaged it was asymmetrical expand and collapse. SO the user can target one panel or the other quickly as they prefer.

I would also favour a dblclick for single panel expand/collapse.

So you can have one or the other setup, or if you wanted both. Then what you might try to implement is to create two zones, halves, and assign top half as asymmetrical action, and bottom half symmetrical action for some UI mystery UX.

WWW Diplomacy Facade - a Frontpage Manger / Landing Page NodeBB Feature

How to onboard users when in a registered access only mode.

If you run a login only forum. A most severe way to stop all crawlers. You lose www visbility.

While this may protect overall privacy in an iron curtain fashion, you most probably still need something to hook and onboard users to your wonderful NodeBB resource, if it's not run as an internal private platform, for e.g. a corporate entity across branches and continents, then you really most likely still do need to be open somehow to the world wide web.

One solution, is to stick a wordpress (or similar) frontend in front of NodeBB, and curate and control what the www sees, and offer the NodeBB forum as a big sign-up bonus. However, there are a lot of undesirable aspect to this as a solution, and IMHO is teh sub-optimal solution because:

increases or split hosting costs requires a different support set wordpress / php is a big attack vector

Another solution, one which must be the optimal for sake of staying within the NodeBB system and adhering to Less is most certainly More, thus incurring no extra hosting or maintenance costs, would be to have a Wordpress or CMS-lite like feature and manager the creates unique Landing page(s) as an alternative to any of the existing landing pages.

It's called Facade and it's a NodeBB vapourware or vapourfeature existing in this post, and here is how it might work in a most basic form:

Facade - Create Unique Dynamic Landing pages In NodeBB

Can populate landing-page/homepage with existing topics and/or bespoke content Widget expansive layout What else?

Rambling note: Understandably there is overlap with Custom Static pages for NodeBB plugin (caveat: it's been some time I played with that so do not remember the complete feature set) but in this vision the content can also be also be dynamic.

If it were then as simple to customise your landing page as you drag and drop categories in the admin panel which is a neat and beautifully implemented feature for organising layout of the categories page, then we're smokin', expand what already works to enable new features, it might mean best path is to take custom static pages into core to roll in more of the above functionality and features.

There are more than 8000 users at present. Does nodeBB have a plugin to create users in bulk or tell me how to do it

If you put a canvas element with a specific ID in a widget you should be able to check it's existence with $('#idofcanvas').length if it only appears on one category then the check will return false on all other pages.

@baris wooow 😮
Thanks for putting this into a priority 👍

@baris thanks for your help, but I meant how can I do this from the backend side, if I do this from navigation as you said, this simply just removes it from the website as long as you are not logged, but if anyone knows the URL they can still access to the tabs.