@julian True enough and a step in the right direction. Now if you can extend the chat system to also thread messages/sessions by a given subject (or even some other filter/criteria) you have yourself the best of both worlds. Real-time chat and a pseudo private messaging system. I can't say I particularly enjoy the facebook paradigm. For a more extensible or complete system that would appeal to the youngsters and older guys like myself who are more entrenched you'll want to cover both bases i.e. the chat and more traditional email like presentation subject/inbox etc scenarios. Key being not to make the UX convoluted or inoperable. For nodeBB to make inroads into the traditional forums space i.e. IPB, phpBB, xen etc you need to make the transitional process as painless as possible for your end users who in most cases are not too tech savvy. My 2 cents on this.
Wouldn't that cause unneeded bloat to have the chat system and a full separate PM system you are describing? Unfortunately FB for better or worse has set a standard and has become the normal.
@Ganzuelo said:
Wouldn't that cause unneeded bloat to have the chat system and a full separate PM system you are describing? Unfortunately FB for better or worse has set a standard and has become the normal.
Potential is there for bloat. I'm not suggesting to slap it on there without some thought and configurability. Looking at all other forum platforms this is one obvious feature that's lacking.
Facebook is not aiming to be a forum platform. It's a one to many broadcasting tool with some feedback modules added as an afterthought then buried by 15 layers of ever changing obfuscation. It has set its own standard and I don't see other forums moving to their model. Different tools for different purposes.
Although multi-thread PMs could be a plugin, I can't imagine any of my users desiring it. Maybe it would be a better fit on other forums.
Once you get to the point where you're sending a ton of different messages to the same person that need to be quickly accessible, you're somewhat likely to either be their facebook friend or have their email address.
The group message option intrigues me though!
So, a friendly way to do this would just be to add an extra step in between clicking on the user, and opening the chat window, perhaps instead of being
User List > Chat Window
it could go to
User List > Subject/Topic > Chat Window
This would then open that specific chat. Maybe even make it mobile friendly by adding some swipe left loading business to make it all 2014. 
The subject/topic part would need a + for new topic, and a back button to go back to chats. The only issue I can see is how the bar on the bottom would handle multiple topics from the same user etc.
@a_5mith good idea. That's sort of what I was thinking also. Maybe if feeling adventurous you can allow multiple recipients also from the user list.
@nik That's another thing entirely.
@trevor Total typo there.. I meant PM, Trevor. The IM is great. PM is what I was referring. You can't substitute PM with IM. IM doesn't have ability to archive conversations based on set topic. It classes everything as one giant conversation. But PMs serve different purpose. I'm glad @nik has made that point eloquently too. I think it would be a great step forward for NodeBB to focus more on functional tools within forum and ACP. You only have to look at the list of forum solutions out there to see that 90% of them offer PM out of the box. Discourse included - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Internet_forum_software#Features.
Okay, so after reading, I see the difference now (I should have known the difference since I've used so many forum softwares). I'd opt for private messaging to be implemented in that case, but thats just my opinion. I see how this can be done using ...sigh the FB approach. There's already chat, so we can extend this into its own page and keep an archive of all messages.
As @julian stated, its all on how you implement it and can be done fairly simple. You've already got BBCode in the chat (for the most part), just strip out certain tags in the IM module verses the standalone PM page. I can clearly see how this would look (pretty damn good). We'd have the edge with both integrated as one.
@zenkamal said:
I'll start...
Robust email capability (email notifications for new posts and stuff, pretty customizable).
Yep.
Sleek default avatars consisting of the first letter of the user name.
Defintely.
Better search function!
https://github.com/NodeBB/NodeBB/issues/1603
But still needs a little bit more tweaking. To be honest I don't even like using the search for NodeBB because it doesn't help me find what I need, it's too much text to look through because it shows the whole entire post with HTML and all which is confusing. If I'm looking for a particular keyword it should highlight a snippet of that keyword. The whole search is not of my taste, in which case no matter how you style it or think you've got it, the problem is in the core of the search. Another thing is, why do we not have live search? Lets live up to being the forum of the future please, thanks.
Side-by-side reply preview capability?
Another pet peeve of mine. Why should you have to click a tab just to see if your format is correct?
I dunno what else. NodeBB is already lightning fast and looks nice.
More to come.
@trevor said
To be honest I don't even like using the search for NodeBB because it doesn't help me find what I need, it's too much text to look through because it shows the whole entire post with HTML and all which is confusing. If I'm looking for a particular keyword it should highlight a snippet of that keyword. The whole search is not of my taste, in which case no matter how you style it or think you've got it, the problem is in the core of the search. Another thing is, why do we not have live search? Lets live up to being the forum of the future please, thanks.
This, topics are quite the pain to find through the search, as a result we do get a lot of duplicate topics, but it's difficult for me to link to the original topic, because I sometimes can't find it. should definitely be a core feature rather than an optional addon. Search is one of those necessities, along with being able to login and type on a keyboard.
Another pet peeve of mine. Why should you have to click a tab just to see if your format is correct?
Show the markup Pon de right hand side, shoow de markup Pon de right.
@a_5mith New composer. 
Hooray!
I need to update M4 then with all of these changes.
@trevor Yep. In hindsight a mishmash of chat and PM might make navigation a pain. Keep them separate on a page and a PM widget would be excellent.
@trevor said:
@a_5mith New composer.
I need to update M4 then with all of these changes.
New composer is much better on desktop but alas still pretty samey experience on mobile.
For mobile I would literally strip away the header bar, the utility/kitchen sink bar (buttons too small to use anyway). Write /preview bar can go and move up the whole edit box to take up the top half of the screen.
A lot of wasted real estate. Also the mouse over edit/quote buttons don't translate to a good experience on mobile as most users won't know to click in that area.
@nik Agreed. We recently split up the composer into desktop and mobile varieties, so hopefully we'll see some good advances in the mobile composer soon 
I miss being able to reply on my phone 
What would be the scope to use something like elasticsearch to extend the search into something truly excellent. 
Like this plugin?
Seems outdated though...
@julian Yeah, that would do it. I'll have a look at it. See what happens.
