Which is better NodeBB or Discourse?
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@johnsonjohnson said in Which is better NodeBB or Discourse?:
@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.
@gotwf said in Which is better NodeBB or Discourse?:
.... bunches o' snippage....
- 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.
Pretty sure I was using RAILS before most people hereabouts. Used to own the first edition of "the pick axe book" before some asshat "borrowed" it from my cube and never returned. That was copyrighted 2004 and I'd been using ROR for at least several months prior. It was a dandy alternative to the php security hole of the week. Fast forward to more modern times and I'd prefer to use else. But then I have also not used ROR in a decade so.... my impression may well be outdated.
But whatever. The above was an opinion. Your mileage may vary.
But it is cool that you feel passionate enough about ROR to create an account to post a rebuttal to something I posted nearly a year prior. So, @johnsonjohnson, welcome to NodeBB. You've tried the rest and found the best (TM)
P.S.; Even recounting that history has me pissed off again because they also stole my first edition copy of "The Pragmatic Programmer". Never replaced either. Fsck'ing hate thieves.
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Discourse has at least a crude image resizer in it's markup editor, which would be nice here.
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I don't like Discourse, but almost all of the plugins in discourse are up to date and the speed of error correction is amazing. Unfortunately, nodebb uses outdated technologies that should have been replaced a few years ago. Over the years, the technical debt will be greater. Even joomla was updated, although it took more than 3 years.
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@volanar said in Which is better NodeBB or Discourse?:
@julian https://github.com/jquery/jquery-ui/releases
https://github.com/requirejs/requirejs/releasesInteresting that you should mention require.js, If memory serves that one does mess some stuff up from time to time - particularly if using Firefox with Multi-Account Containers. For e.g., I must do a cache clear and refresh to get all, rather than only some, avatars to load. But... meh... the avatars are just eye candy and I can deal with names/nics.
But, since you mentioned it, I wonder what other glitches you might be referencing? Or is it just that these are old and not well maintained bits?
Edit: Aye, caramba! I just re-investigated and memory seems to have had a page fault. It was/is service-worker.js. But the post that follows this is still relevant so I'll not delete.
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Speaking of glitches...
Strange time keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin'... in(to) the future:
- 2 months later
- 7 months later
- 5 months later
- 2 months later
- 11 months later
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@onur-baran there are many more feature between the two that should be discussed rather than speed.
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Speed is important especially for the page views / impressions if you have a biz model wrapped around your site that keeps the lights on.Be weary of running adverts on Discourse. It is problematic. Infinite school might destroy your hopes and dreams here. I have seen reported and directly almost 80% drop in report revenue in earlier 2.x version and in that case NodeBB solved the problem. Moving to the wrong platform might totally break your business model and in more ways than one!
Fast page loads and option to disable infinite scroll are not to be scoffed at by any means and are also an indication of the kind of thinking and care behind NodeBB and also the quality of what is under the hood.
Existing user bases rarely ever take kindly to new platforms and from my reading and direct experience and comparing notes, Discourse is not a well received upgrade to existing communities.
Thread very carefully here. You may loose your user base overnight and IIRC the creator of Discourse has as much advised it maybe not being for established communities. Discourse does seem orientated more toward those that have no forum presence but what to establish one.
Bottom line - A forum is nothing with users but it's easy to get distracted with the bells and whistles.
NodeBB is like a interative and adaptive evolution. I actually do not like to compare Discourse to NodeBB, Flarum is the obvious comparator, NodeBB is more out on it's own IMHO and NodeBB is more loyal to the idea and concept of a forum.
No platform is perfect, but NodeBB is great, however a godo guide is you have to find or you should look for the one you can live with, not the most features etc. etc.
I think NodeBB is in that ballpark, remember it's not just you but you and all you users have to live with it - I can not state this singular point enough.
I think NodeBB is more technically accessible from many angles and probably easier to make your own and the attitude of the founders comes through in a positive way, not always the case with other platforms.
So to end on an analogous point and I'm no car/auto buff, but if I was to compare NodeBB to a car brand I think I might say it's more Honda.
What brand of car is Discourse, that's a though one... Maybe one of the German ones, BMW perhaps, when it breaks it's a total PITA to fix and suddenly the bills start to mount.
Summary of primary points:
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Caution #1: Moving to the wrong platform might totally break your business model and in more ways than one!
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Caution #2: Moving to the wrong platform might totally break your user base and leave your site overnight.
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Ultimately you need to find a platform you can live with, this means
-- your users can live with
-- you can technically support it without major headache
-- you can afford to host it
-- you can easily scale it and afford the scale
-- you have some wiggle room to easily customise out of the box
-- you can even develop further customisations that are easily supported
It is possible (others may chime in here) but it may be approx 50% cheaper to self host a NodeBB Vs a Discourse in terms of the comparative performance enjoyed.
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@omega said in Which is better NodeBB or Discourse?:
Infinite school might destroy your hopes and dreams here.
Infinite school would definitely destroy my hopes and dreams!
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@omega and how do you explain this?
https://trends.builtwith.com/cms/DiscourseNodebb is similar to a classic forum, and the discourse is similar to a support site. There are problems with the nesting of categories in the discourse. The developers decided that there should be one nesting category on the forum. If you must have 2 or more nesting categories on the forum, then you can unlock the nesting function using the command. But be prepared for the fact that all subcategories of all nesting levels will be displayed on the main page.
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@scottalanmiller said in Which is better NodeBB or Discourse?:
@omega said in Which is better NodeBB or Discourse?:
Infinite school might destroy your hopes and dreams here.
Infinite school would definitely destroy my hopes and dreams!
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@volanar said in Which is better NodeBB or Discourse?:
@omega and how do you explain this?
https://trends.builtwith.com/cms/DiscourseI have been looking at that market dynamic for a while actually, and while I am not discounting your point, there are many reasons why 1/2 are in the top ascendant spot and also they are not necessarily or easily explained by a view that well it's because NodeBB is not as good as these.
You can not discount the existence for a long time of a Digitalocean one-click, very low ethical jump to get a discourse up and running, so the numbers, might be a bit bubbly, how they translate into deep communities, versus a lighter support like presence and interaction, is another story completely.
I am not really to up on docker but I really do not like that extra layer. IT feels like you can barely touch your installation. If you are stuck on a older version, you are also going ot hit real problems with upgrades. So if you are not too technical, you may get hamstrung here very badly.
Upgrading NodeBB is a very lite experience smoother experience IMHO.
The creator of Discourse has a much higher profile due to I guess Stackoverflow, and I'd say a lot of money and marketing has gone in there too or has been available along the way, also I think was at least a year or more ahead in terms of creation and development - not sure if importing existing forums is any easier on discourse or any other new forum platform, but that might be a factor to.
You could ask the same question about xenoforo and it is nothing like Discourse, it is more like NodeBB but really closer to phpBB/VBulletin type platforms, it is very popular but from using a few forums on this I am not too impressed, but it seems to know it's market really well and what it wants and that means a lot in this space.
Nodebb is similar to a classic forum, and the discourse is similar to a support site.
I think that is a very fair and efficient composition of both platforms.
There are problems with the nesting of categories in the discourse. The developers decided...
For me this is the actual issue with Discourse "the developers decided...", there is a bit of that's they way we like it / do it round these parts arrogance baked into the goods - infinite scroll is emblematic of that type decision that is so divisive, you have to realise that thinking is carried forward through all future development - from what I know, it looks like they will never cater to the other side on that issue and I do not know why if it is ego, or they put everything on black and it is technically to difficult to now add a no-infinite scroll option and the subject remains in the "lets not talk about the war" category.
You'll find a few more "decision" easter eggs, that will have you scratching your head. It's not a terrible platform, it's a very good platform, but sometimes, tastes and styles are not always compatible, find what you can live with.
Discourse does seem to have built up a lot of steam in recent years but I still view it as a better fit for a new community, but community is the wrong word, it's missing a lot of the little touches that engender community.
Plus you get to have interesting threads like this here on NodeBB community, I never noticed such stuff on Discourse meta forum, maybe because I'm always trying to fix something technical.
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@omega said in Which is better NodeBB or Discourse?:
Plus you get to have interesting threads like this here on NodeBB community, I never noticed such stuff on Discourse meta forum, maybe because I'm always trying to fix something technical.
There's a reason for that -- dissenting opinions get locked and deleted quite quickly.
You'll notice we don't do that here, because it's disingenuous. For awhile, there was a topic talking about how crappy NodeBB was, and how much better Discourse was better. It didn't matter that most of it wasn't true, but it spurred good discussion, and that's what matters.
Our competitors are competing with us for the same market share (that is, online communities), but we're not in the business of shaping online chatter to be in our favour. Take that however you want
@omega - correct, discourse came on the scene a year before we did, but over the time I feel we've accomplished rough feature parity. I always feel Discourse got a huge leg up because of Mr. Atwood's fame, and Flarum got a huge leg up because they're centred around a more accessible PHP backend (even if that's not true anymore? Not sure.)... But the fact of the matter is those are excuses and leaning on excuses provides a justification for slacking off. I'd much rather work on earning NodeBB's fans, one at a time, because I know you guys are excited for NodeBB for NodeBB's sake, not because I'm cool
@volnar NodeBB has been compared as a good replacement for older forum software, yes. We did this on purpose, because I believe that BBSes and early forums were a very natural way for humans to communicate (look at me getting all meta...). Leaving messages asynchronously makes a lot of sense, and there's a reason why BBSes evolved alongside email in the early internet. I do not agree with the assertion that real-time is always better, but rather a selective use of both leads to an overall better experience.
That's why NodeBB takes many of the great, working, concepts of forums (e.g. (sub)categories, dedicated reply box, user accounts, avatars, signatures, etc.) and try to improve on them with what we know about the modern web now.
Other new forum solutions have come and declared that "x is the new way", not realising that there was a reason why the old way was really the way because it was just really good already.
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Nodebb is no worse than other platforms and is definitely better than php solutions. It is stable and scalable. But nodebb does not have solutions for installation in 1 click. That's why there are so few communities on nodebb. If digitalocean and other cloud platforms had such an installation, it would be easy to compete with discourse. Docker is not the best option, it is better to use Podman
https://github.com/ahwayakchih/nobbic -
@volanar That is true. We did consider having a one-click install method via DigitalOcean, although we do not have the resources to maintain it.
For now, the solution is to utilise our one-click hosting option, but I fully admit that this is outside of the price range for a lot of potential customers.
Thank you for re-iterating the point once again -- I really do want to have a one-click option at some point.
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Discourse Announces $20m Series A Investment by Pace Capital and First Round Capital | Blog
We’re pleased to announce that Discourse has taken $20 million in Series A investment from Pace Capital, joined by our seed investors, First Round Capital. This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at…
Discourse Meta (meta.discourse.org)
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tl-dr: I confess to feeling a bit crotchety at present. The thin skinned and easily offended may want to bail now.
@volanar Thanks for the link. It further confirms just how fsck'd up Discourse is. Here is what I view when I click on your URL immediately up post:
Now is not that special? (Yeah, I mayhaps shoulda, woulda, coulda cropped that but thought I let y'all regale in the hipness of all that glorious white space.) Were I to take a screenshot of uMatrix detailed breakdown we'd see 116 calls to various media, css, scripts, etc. hosted on Cloudflare. Hell, I guess in interest of full disclosure I need to break it down, lest the forest become lost for the trees:
- Scripts: 57
- CSS: 43
- Images: 2
Yippie skippie! You're really rockin' Cloudflare!
Mayhaps this just may be related to why Discourse is slowest of the slow, as evidenced a bit up post
@onur-baran said in Which is better NodeBB or Discourse?:
Google Pagespeed Scores:
And as for this query:
@volanar said in Which is better NodeBB or Discourse?:
@omega and how do you explain this?
https://trends.builtwith.com/cms/DiscourseI don't. Rather I chalk it up to a bunch of dumb as a post lamer's lacking the capacity for critical analysis that have been "getting by" all their lives via group think, following the herd and going w/whatever is hip on CIO this month. An unfortunate testament to just how lazy we've become. Oh, poor you! You don't have a one click install!! Cry me a river!
Well, snowflakes, thank that gods that you do NOT have to actually compile AND configure all your myriad sordid dependencies from source as prerequisite for even dreaming about running on your platform. Yeah, there was a day when Linux really did suck in this regard. But I digress w/the venting. Let's get back to some cold facts, Jack:
That last is really a gas! How many low traffic sites do you know that use cloudflare? Why do they use it? More oft than not it has not one thing to do with technical merit/analysis and everything to do with following the herd. It has been said that perception is nine tenths of reality. At least until reality rears its ugly head.
Note: I did my research on Cloudflare many years back and hence never bothered employing it for any of my personal hole in the wall projects. Shout out to @omega for the more updated links shared during recent private discussions.
Rock on NodeBB!
