I tried many solutions before choosing Nodebb. Flarum is not bad, but it still lacks too many features in my opinion, and I don't like the style of Discourse in which I get lost too easily in the interface.
In fact, I hesitated between Xenforo and NodeBB and the fact that NodeBB runs on nodejs and is free made me decide.
@鄭宇佋 A less biased answer would be - they aren't entirely equivalent, and the choice is a combination of specific needs and preferences that IMO can't be generalized to "x is better in general".
phpBB is the oldest forum, and as such it embodies the older style of forums from before social media made things like tags, real time interactions, feeds etc. popular. However, it is probably the most feature rich of all offerings if you have time and knowledge to set it up.
Flarum (and I think the Laravel community software too? Never used it :V) is a simpler forum that is tag-based. You can nest tags once in Flarum, but only once and it seems to more encourage a feed approach where your main page is filled with topics sorted in some way and you use tags to go somewhere if you're looking for something specific. This is in contrast to the "classical" structure I mentioned, where you will have subforums/categories that you can infinitely nest and the idea is that the user first goes to the category that will have the topics that will be interesting to them.
However, NodeBB and Discourse are both somewhere closer to the middle, but on the opposite sides. In both you will find categories and tags, but from what I've seen the emphasis is different - NodeBB is categories that can have tags, Discourse is tags that can have categories 
Of course, there are a lot of other differences. As mentioned, more modern software is better at doing stuff real-time. Notifications, chats (Discourse and NodeBB have some form of private conversations built in. Flarum and phpBB have extensions that add it), loading new posts without reloads etc.
AFAIK NodeBB is the only one of these using WebSockets (socket.io)
Discourse uses some custom polling based protocol.
Flarum actually doesn't do much live stuff by default (just kilke phpBB), but it does have notifications that can use officially-supported pusher extension to work.
One major difference though - phpBB, Flarum and Laravel.io are PHP-based, so you can make them work on generally cheaper shared web hosting, meanwhile Discourse and NodeBB will require a server that can run Ruby or Node respectively - for example a Linux VPS.
Which one is better depends on what you want then.
Laravel.io seems to be most limited in terms of customization, unless there are some undocumented features on that front. So if there are any things you don't like about the way it looks or feels - don't choose it.
If you like the Flarum tag structure and don't mind it lacking some things (well, it's a beta after all), it seems like the most performant option.
phpBB? If you are willing to buy/develop some modern theme and spend time to configure it, sure. Otherwise I wouldn't recommend it.
The decision between NodeBB and Discourse is harder, and while I prefer NodeBB, I'd say it's mostly down to your preferences, specifics of what you want to use the forum for and the preference for technology stack (Node, Express, MongoDB/Redis/Postgres + no major js framework outside of jQuery on front-end for NodeBB vs Ruby on Rails, Postgres + Ember.js on front-end for Discourse).
Some unfortunately older topics on this (some will have much more recent replies, so might be useful to read them; I tried to include topics from meta-forums of other forum software and user forums based on software in question):
Obviously remember that the answers will be biased essentially everywhere - here, towards NodeBB. On Discourse forums, towards Discourse. On Flarum - towards Flarum. Etc.
As of now nodebb only best.
Laravel.io is not free i think
Phpbb ui and features i don't like. Flarum I've used. It's built with laravel i think. And that is still in beta version
As of now NodeBB and Discourse are good.
I'm using NodeBB from 6+ months and working smoothly on Digital ocean 5$ droplet.
@pitaj said in Remove login button:
@jaredbusch you could try something like this in your custom css in the ACP:
a[href="/login"] { display: none !important; }
That did it.
so as a quick test, a little searching in the persona theme source login, I found I could refine it to this.
https://github.com/NodeBB/nodebb-theme-persona/search?q=guest+login
Then I added a quick inline style command to hide it in those 6 returned locations.
Then there were two place in /templates/partials/menu.tpl that referenced /login. I did the same there.
Would this be simple enough for a theme setting? Obviously not as an inline style.. that was simply the easilet/quickest way to see if hiding those elements worked.
Rebuilt and gone.
Is it really most?
First, WhatsApp, Signal and other encrypted communicators work that way for a reason. They can't read old messages because they don't have the keys to decrypt the old messages, even if for some reason they'd have access to their ciphertext form - which they also don't, as at least with Signal messages aren't even stored on the server after being delivered.
So seeing message history from before joining would require getting other clients in the group to replay their messages just for the new person to even have access to them.
By contrast, services that aren't E2EE and store messages on the server don't have either of these problems - so for example Messenger can easily just fetch a new member the old messages, and it does so.
NodeBB isn't ent-to-end encrypted, and is entirely server based with AFAIK no local storage for messages at all - I don't think they're even cached in any way. So there isn't a technical limitation to implementing this.
@pitaj said in Remove login button:
Easiest way is probably too hide it with CSS.
That is what I was assuming I would need to do. Was hoping though.
Any pointer on the best way to handle it, that will survive upgrades, before I try and break things?
@dogs said in Remove login button:
I search in ACP for "login" but I couldn't find any setting to disable login global on the forum.
Yeah, there never has been.
Is there an easy place to remove the login button from being seen?
Using NodeBB for a small project with only a couple people posting but many public users that will never have login capabilities.
Exactly.
I am using 4K monitor with 300% scaling. I attached several images in the following:
It also explain that why I want to remove the fixed header in the head https://community.nodebb.org/topic/15256/layout-design-in-the-latest-nodebb
