Which is better NodeBB or Discourse?
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@scottalanmiller said in Which is better NodeBB or Discourse?:
@Joykiller said in Which is better NodeBB or Discourse?:
I personally hate Discourse due to their docker wrapper. but thats me.
Oh gosh, that would pretty much turn me away right there. Docker is great for devs, but makes little sense for production operations. Tends to come from shops that are run by devs and have little operational knowledge or experience. We just had a discussion about that last week in our forum: https://mangolassi.it/topic/19577/docker-for-production-use-of-third-party-software/
Docker is for lamers who don't know how to be system admins
And, of course, rapid development. When Docker first started making it's appearance I embraced it but was later aghast when folks started routinely deploying to production, and predicted to some buddies that some security nightmares were just around the corner... And they were.
But enough Docker bashing. I looked at Discourse long, long ago, in a far away galaxy (well, in Internet time, anyways). Ruled it out right away for following (admittedly highly opinionated) reasons:
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Docker centric: Now that I am primarily only on my own projects, I am free to abandon Linux in favor of what I consider to be superior OS's like FreeBSD and SmartOS. Nothing personal but platform lockin equates to vendor lockin. And that just ain't freedom enough for me
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Rails vs. NodeJS: Are you kidding? Was an early adopter of Rails back, circa 2003/4 or so? It rocked at that time as an alternative to then php stuff sporting the serious security hole of the day/week. Or so it seemed - php was pretty sketchy for a while there. Fast forward a decade and a half and it's freakin' no contest! Rails is all but history/legacy, at least in my mind.
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Main Dev Heads: Cool vs kind arrogant asshats (sounds like that may have changed). This was immediately off putting and I was kind of surprised Discourse became so popular, but I guess that's one thing fame will help you with.
So... note to the NodeBB devs:
Please do keep doing what YOU do best and do not worry too much about feature parity w/what, in my view, is an inferior, non starter platform just because they've got a few extra bells, whistles, and/or mindshare. Popularity more oft than not does NOT equal technical superiority but rather merely demonstrates whos' the better con men. Err.. marketing team....
Now obviously I do not mean to preclude a bit of cross pollination when it makes sense. But I have been around long enough to observe FOSS project loose their vision in the quest for "Feature Parity" with some perceived competition. So, just weighing in w/my $0.02 to encourage you to stay true to your vision. Cuz it's been workin' pretty good fer' me ;D
And finally, in closing, the astute may have noticed I enjoy making tongue in cheek comments from time to time for the humor value. Don't get yer' beak too tweaked, eh? It's not a religion for me.
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@omega said in Which is better NodeBB or Discourse?:
A one click would be useful alright.
Would only take a minute to turn this into a one click install
Deploying NodeBB 1.11.1 on CentOS 7 with MongoDB 4
NodeBB is a powerful, open source package for building online communities and forums. We usually recommend running it on CentOS 7. The current NodeBB relea...
MangoLassi (mangolassi.it)
We can deploy on CentOS 7 in a minute or two. We do it repeatedly for testing. Just go right through the list and done.
(Notice you need to update 1.11.x to 1.12.x).
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@gotwf said in Which is better NodeBB or Discourse?:
- Rails vs. NodeJS: Are you kidding?
Jeff has a lot of ties to Joel Spolsky who owns the only software company we ever asked for our money back from. This goes way back. But we tried out FogBugz long ago, bought a license and everything. And found that not only did it not support any production OS to deploy on top of, it was all written in VBS. Not even VB.NET, but VBS. Total embarrassment, I can't believe that they released it. We refused to even deploy it as not being production ready and not thought through. They had never considered that it might get used in a business.
Rails isn't VBS bad, I like it and it has its place. But there is an ecosystem of being behind the times, and not thinking through how the technology is going to play out once you actually want to deploy.
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@scottalanmiller said in Which is better NodeBB or Discourse?:
But there is an ecosystem of being behind the times, and not thinking through how the technology is going to play out once you actually want to deploy.
Indubitably. Hitting the nail square on the head here.
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@gotwf said in Which is better NodeBB or Discourse?:
I was kind of surprised Discourse became so popular, but I guess that's one thing fame will help you with.
I used to read Jeff Atwood's blog, I really liked it back then, and he said a lot of things I agreed (and still do, sometimes) with. He has a huge following and that's what allows him to speak his mind and be heavily opinionated, because lots of people will listen and change their minds. That same audience lends Discourse a whole heap of validity simply because of the name recognition factor, and all the power to them, really! I wish I had that kind of marketing clout, but here at NodeBB, we need to focus on building a superior product instead
We don't really want to have a say in whether one product is better than another. We've stolen good ideas from Discourse and Flarum, and vice versa. It all makes for a better product anyway, doesn't it?
FWIW if I tried to be as opinionated as Mr. Atwood, I'd get flamed incessantly. My average reputation on my HackerNews posts is... 1
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@julian said in Which is better NodeBB or Discourse?:
I used to read Jeff Atwood's blog, I really liked it back then, and he said a lot of things I agreed (and still do, sometimes) with. He has a huge following and that's what allows him to speak his mind and be heavily opinionated, because lots of people will listen and change their minds. That same audience lends Discourse a whole heap of validity simply because of the name recognition factor, and all the power to them, really!
What's hilarious is how you just described the lack of discourse as being what makes Discourse viable
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@julian said in Which is better NodeBB or Discourse?:
FWIW if I tried to be as opinionated as Mr. Atwood, I'd get flamed incessantly.
I'm at least as opinionated, and I do get flamed incessantly. But hey, that's how it goes.
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No knocking the guy when good content presents itself. He's the reason I have dual monitors (not three though), and have a USB drive on my keyring.
That said, the USB drive came from China (hooray Amazon FBA!) and doesn't actually work, but that's a story for another day.
He might also be a major reason I use a mechanical keyboard
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@julian said in Which is better NodeBB or Discourse?:
That said, the USB drive came from China (hooray Amazon FBA!) and doesn't actually work, but that's a story for another day.
Probably disabled by US sanctions!
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@julian said in Which is better NodeBB or Discourse?:
No knocking the guy when good content presents itself.
I read and listened to all of his stuff in the StackOverlow creation days. Lots of good thoughts back then. That was a lot of where I did my early pondering on community and forum behaviour, trends, metrics, and such, and why I was able to advice Spiceworks so heavily to keep them from disaster... to which they totally ignored me and did everything that research, industry knowledge, Jeff, and I had documented made no sense to do.
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Regarding our experience, NodeBB is more appreciated than Discourse for the visual aspect, and works well for us.
However there is one feature Discourse has that is missing in Nodebb : it is the possibility to delegate the sub-category management to moderators. -
@cfrancois said in Which is better NodeBB or Discourse?:
However there is one feature Discourse has that is missing in Nodebb : it is the possibility to delegate the sub-category management to moderators.
That would definitely be a really nice feature.
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This post is deleted!
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@gotwf's claim that Ruby on Rails is somehow history is absolute nonsense. So is the claim that it's somehow hard to customize and scale.
Most people who make such claims have no idea what Rails actually is. They've never used it, or at least never developed anything substantial with it. In addition they've often spent most of their lives learning something else and is therefore reluctant to vouch for anything new regardless of what it is.
Having said that, I think Discourse is crap. Way to many features, and from a Rails perspective it's an absolute mess. Plus, the fact that the community refuses to help you unless you run Docker is just sad. NodeBB is by far the better alternative. However, if you want to see a Rails forum done right, check out Thredded:
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quite interesting to read part of this thread today... i must have bookmarked it 5 years ago!
i still can see some value on forums. in practice. no other written communication platform allows for continued and effective async communication of large groups.
i haven't ever really used slack, but i'm assuming that most of you have, and you're still here, so there must be something more about the forums...
but in theory i can see how a compromise among irc-like slack and telegram, emails and scuttlebutt, and forums can emerge. it's the old holy grail quest, i know... the only reason i bring this idea here is because i think some might understand and either share this view or get some idea out of just thinking about it...
if so, we should probably create a new topic and see if we can further think about it...
perhaps (this is a big perhaps), among every other communication tool project out there today, nodebb is in the best position to give birth for such a thing, with some radical changes on code and roadmap.
which is better? there's no comparison if this is really the case!
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@johnsonjohnson said in Which is better NodeBB or Discourse?:
Ruby on Rails is somehow history is absolute nonsense.
Have to agree. I don't use it much now, but overall I think it's a great platform with a lot of value and we always consider it for projects.
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@cregox said in Which is better NodeBB or Discourse?:
i haven't ever really used slack, but i'm assuming that most of you have, and you're still here, so there must be something more about the forums...
Slack is like an advanced instant messaging platform. It's great for real time "meeting replacements". But it's all but useless as a forum.
I think of it as ephemeral posting vs. archived discussion. Slack is for shooting the poo or finding a quick fix to a team's problems. It replaces sitting around a table with a coffee (or a beer.)
But a forum allows for a knowledge base, with peer review, and updates. And good ones, such as this one and others, can be so fast that they effectively allow for instant messaging as well.
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@cregox said in Which is better NodeBB or Discourse?:
which is better? there's no comparison if this is really the case!
While I'm a huge NodeBB fan and use it in multiple places, I don't feel like there is a "one tool for all cases" potential out there. We tried replacing some internal corporate tools with NodeBB and it just didn't work for us that well. And even my biggest NodeBB community still hangs out on Telegram for the most random of chats.
Just like email, instant messaging, and traditional telephone calls (and now the resurgence of teleconferencing) have all survived alongside each other all this time with none being obviously able to replace the others, I think forums are just one of those tools. Each serves a purpose different enough that they can't overtake each other.
Similarly... books, pamphlets, magazines, newspapers, fold out maps... all printed words, but each format survived because it served a different purpose. Hundreds of years of mass printing, we never merged formats. I think digital words will remain the same.
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@scottalanmiller Exactly. Forums are but one arrow in the quiver. Be pretty silly to expect a single arrow to handle all duties. And if, by some miracle, it could, I bet it would do so in a pretty mediocre manner as a consequence of trying to be too much for too many applications. Despite the ever increasing pressure towards homogeneity, there is still much wisdom in "the unix way".
