Why I chose to use nodeBB over phpBB, Discourse, MyBB and other forums.
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I've always been a fan of forums. Ever since I was 12 years old, I was heavily involved in forums and building communities.
Over the years I used phpBB, vBulletin and other solutions I can't even remember now.
The past few weeks I've been looking around on how to build up a community around book lovers, since I already have a good following on Facebook and I could funnel that traffic to a community of my own.
After weeks of thinking what could I do, I started looking around social networks. But I didn't find what I was looking for, so I thought of building a forum.
Problem was that phpBB and all those solutions are old (I stopped coding in PHP since version 3...), I wasn't that convinced on going that route.
After installing MyBB I was convinced I couldn't build a community on that. It looked so 2000. Plus, developing something for it would be a pain in the ass for me.
So then I tried BuddyPress and bbPress... I even bought a $59 theme for it which I couldn't get a refund for it. It was slow and clumsy, I couldn't understand the interface, hell... this wasn't what I was looking for. I almost quit my plans.
But after looking around for modern forum softwares... I found several SaaS solutions which looked wonderful. But I prefer to run things in my own place. You know that saying "Never build your house on someone else's land", well it's true. It happened to me in real life and happened to me in virtual land too (specially after Facebook's last algorithm update which lowered my page's reach).
I searched for self-hosted solutions and found Discourse and it looked very nice to me. I thought "this is it, I think I can work with this". Then I went to see the specs.
Man, that didn't look good.
Installation guide? Awful. I mean, I'm no noob to this world, but the whole process was a pain in the ass.
Then I got this bright idea...
"I've been coding stuff in node.js for the past year, and I feel comfortable on it. I wonder...
Is there a node.js forum software that's modern and I could work with?"
I wasn't sure before asking "know-it-all" Google. My experience with CMS in node is that they are still very basic.
If only there was something interesting...
So I typed... "node forum software". And I hit "enter".
I found nodeBB.
It looked very, very interesting.
Looks modern and felt sharp and crispy. Check.
Responsive theme. Check.
Plugins. Check.
Installation. Bit of a pain in the ass, but fine after tweaking around with the server and other things. Check.
Stability. 290 users registered, 22,000 pageviews in one day. Seems fine so far. Check.And so far, I've been checking the documents and started to modify some things along the way.
Then I hit a roadblock with one of the plugins. I submitted an issue request in their git plugin. I see it's from one of the coders for this software @julian. He answered a couple minutes later.
Superb. Awesome. I never write so much, but the whole experience has made me write this post.
I hope to be able to contribute with plugins in the nearby future. I'm really grateful.
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one question... what specs is your server to be able to handle 22k pageviews/290 users?
Just curious
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Hey @Adam-Poniatowski 256 GB SSD disk, 64 GB RAM, dedicated server on Dreamhost
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@Esteban-Constante wow... that's overkill
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@pichalite I also run a wordpress website and another node app in there... the overkill part is the wordpress site
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@Esteban-Constante now that makes sense.
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@julian said in Why I chose to use nodeBB over phpBB, Discourse, MyBB and other forums.:
Glad to hear that you are liking NodeBB
Hope you stick around, always nice to have new regulars.
I will. I'm building my platform around nodeBB. Hopefully I'll be able to contribute.
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@Esteban-Constante what's the load look like? I assume CPU's at around 1% and memory at maybe 10%?
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@Adam-Poniatowski at times I've seen the CPU go up to 20% (usually is around 3-7%), memory is at 0.9%
I plan on pushing nodeBB to it's limits. Hope this can help @julian and the rest of the team.
Current stats:
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@Adam-Poniatowski With 196 users connected at the same time, the CPU load was 20% in average, and with 30-37% spikes.
I'll keep pushing it over the limits of my current server.
It's not clustered, I have no experience with that.
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@Esteban-Constante if you're not clustering, you absolutely should. It should greatly increase the responsiveness of your forum.
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@PitaJ said in Why I chose to use nodeBB over phpBB, Discourse, MyBB and other forums.:
@Esteban-Constante if you're not clustering, you absolutely should. It should greatly increase the responsiveness of your forum.
I need to check how to do it using Apache, guide only has nginx.
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@Esteban-Constante Interesting. Then theoretically it should handle about 2000 users (or more, depending what is the load when there are 0 users to use as a baseline) before peaking out at max.
Clustering is a bit of a pain to setup, but once its done and tested (and works), you don't have to worry about it anymore. Just remember to create a backup of it... it will save a lot of time
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@Adam-Poniatowski Thanks Adam!
I'm also trying to move to a cloud hosting in order to scale efficiently.
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@theo1 said in Why I chose to use nodeBB over phpBB, Discourse, MyBB and other forums.:
I was trying to choose between Discourse and nodeBB as a way to let readers interact with my Ghost powered blog and came across your article. Thanks for writing up why you like nodeBB.
Five years on NodeBB with this large site and we've been super happy with it. Performance is great, updates are regular, support is great.
