We all know nodebb is good, also would like to learn about why your choose nodebb over discourse. Thank you.
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@phenomlab This is a very well made post.
My first time getting exposed to internet forum was around 2008 ish. There was just, LAMP stack that's it. PHP webhosting proliferated everywhere and the popular forum option that time was like phpBB, myBB, vBulletin, IPB. Then Xenforo getting traction. You can host it anywhere, there are free hosting everywhere.For now I don't see much place where you can host NodeJS app, without requiring credit cards. With Heroku removing their free dyno plan, Railway.App now also requires $5 to get you out of trial account. Cyclic.sh is now my choice if I want to spin my NodeJS application without costing a penny (If you are interested you can use my referral for $10 credits or something).
But sadly it can't host NodeBB because of SocketIO is unsupported. So I'm stuck with Digitalocean for now.
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@cat have a look at webdock.io. They have a free 24 hour trial for you to test their services, and this could be a good way to at least experiment with a server before you decide to purchase.
There aren't many "free" services these days, but there are "freemium" providers such as the above.
PS - my internet journey began much earlier - see
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For me it also was the more traditional organizational structure, as compared to more tag-focused design of Discourse and Flarum. I needed top-level categories, and while Discorse technically allows for this, the categories view there never looked right to me (actually I never liked how Discourse was designed, it somehow manages to feel too minimalistic and too cluttered at the same time for me)
And it got bonus points for not requiring Docker - it is nice, but if I need I can dockerize myself, not having the option to run "bare metal" officically supported is more annoying IMO. And despite only supporting Docker officially, Discourse doesn't even provide official Docker Compose files instead opting for their own pups yaml-based linux-only environment bootstrapper and bash installation scripts, somehow ending up with less (official) portability than NodeBB.
Heck, because it's all in single container you don't even have access to the database from host if you followed their instructions and even need to
sudo -u postgresinside because the default user doesn't can't runpsql...The way Discourse is installed feels like they somehow took the worst parts of containers and classical installation scripts and combined them (actually the more I read about it the worse it seems somehow).
EDIT: more cursed Discourse docker knowledge - their (compressed, since that's easier to check and I'd assume compression ratios are similar) slim image is actually larger than NodeBB docker image + alpine postgres docker image. And if the alpine PR comes through, NodeBB+MongoDB too (and then it'd be by almost 50%).
Probably because Discourse, aside from bundling postgres, redis and nginx, also needs to have there three language runtimes/compilers (Ruby, Node.js and Rust for some reason edit2: that reason appears to be compiling oxipng which doesn't provide prebuilt arm64 binaries. They're not using a separate build stage or anything, they just added ~100MB of another language compiler and tooling just to compile a single library)But besides installation, NodeBB is also using technologies I primarily used at the time I started with it (JS and MongoDB - I simply have more experience with these than Ruby/PHP and Postgres), which made it easier to get into extending and modifying NodeBB (and it appears I did the latter more than 50 times now based on my PRs
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@cat said in We all know nodebb is good, also would like to learn about why your choose nodebb over discourse. Thank you.:
For now I don't see much place where you can host NodeJS app, without requiring credit cards. With Heroku removing their free dyno plan, Railway.App now also requires $5 to get you out of trial account. Cyclic.sh is now my choice if I want to spin my NodeJS application without costing a penny (If you are interested you can use my referral for $10 credits or something).
Oracle (of all companies) has a very generous always free tier, including 4 ARM cores with 24 GB of memory and 2 small x86 VMs with 1/8th (shared, burstable to a full core) of a hypethreaded x86 core with 1GB of memory each, for a total of up to 4VMs (limited by 200GB of free storage, since the minimum size is 50GB). So you can run 4 1-core 6GB RAM ARM VMs or a single 4-core 24GB ARM and 2 x86 VMs.
You just need to keep them from being deemed idle and reclaimed (which happens when there's less than 15% 95th percentile CPU, network or memory utilization for a week).Also, the ARM machines have a 1Gbps link per core and 10TB/month free egress (ingress is unlimited, as is tradition for cloud). And they centralize almost all networking costs in the bandwidth - so (with some count limitations for always-free accounts), cloud networks, NAT, ssh bastion hosts, site-to-site VPN and even L4 load balancing (not L7 though) is included
Other than that? No real usage limits and they even don't do the marketing calls anymore (yes, they actually used to call people who signed up to the free tier, at least in my region... But this was when it was much less enticing, so probably much less popular).
It requires adding a card for verification, but they have the best always free tier system out of the major cloud providers since they require explicit action to switch account from always-free (with strict service limits, so you just can't launch anything that isn't free) to pay-as-you-go (that keeps the always-free services but allows you to launch stuff beyond the free limit).
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Build, test and deploy applications on the Cloud with always free cloud services and get $300 in credit towards other cloud services.
(www.oracle.com)
edit: also note that their Ubuntu images have some networking quirks (tl;dr is that they set them up with iptables that work for firewalld but break with ufw. There are a lot of resources online for resolving this issue though)
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@oplik0 said in We all know nodebb is good, also would like to learn about why your choose nodebb over discourse. Thank you.:
It requires adding a card for verification
In the US, privacy dot com solves this problem with virtual cards...
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(privacy.com)
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@cat said in We all know nodebb is good, also would like to learn about why your choose nodebb over discourse. Thank you.:
Easy to turn it into an app, I just run PWABuilder on the site and published it on Google Play Store.
Wow, have to check this out.
Is there a guide for it? -
@dave1904 There isn't specific guide, but it is simple. You just enter the URL of your NodeBB installation, then enter it on PWABuilder. The builder will then give you checklists to follow. And when you're satisfied you can download the files (aab, apk, etc) that you can upload to the store.
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