What BB did you use before NodeBB?
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@trevor For some reason, your IP.Board theme got me feeling nostalgic (don't quite know why)
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Hahah, that nostalgia is why we came back to forums in the first place @CaioDA... forums were a part of our youth, and we just don't want to give them up
@bdharrington7 Glad you found us -- I'm sure we'd rather not have a competing Node.js forum product
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@trevor Now that you mention the design aspect, I've realized that every "modern" forum software has a distinct design that you can notice almost immediately. The one that is the least distinctive in my opinion is NodeBB, and even then, you know when a forum is running it.
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@psychobunny said:
10 years on phpbb myself, mainly developing an RPG mod for it called ADR (You ask, RPG's on a forum? -- if you've been with phpbb2 for a while you may have heard of ADR, Cash Mod, Zarath/Moogie's rpgs, and/or nulavatar, the best example being Gaia Online, if you haven't then maybe you've seen forums before with cash/xp/level shown underneath a customizable avatar before at the very least)
there have been some unsuccessful attempts at porting or trying what we did on IPB and VB although I can't remember their names off by hand.
battling other forum users is the ultimate form of gamification imo and ADR et al. took it to the next level. I really really really can't wait till I get the free time to try something like that on nodebb
You know this is the kind of stuff a big company like zappos would use to get their employees to work harder. Completing real work to level up game stats. Thats the future. How do you expect this new generation of gamers to work for ten minutes? Make work part of the game.
Off topic but just had to put it out there.
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@CaioDA said:
@trevor Now that you mention the design aspect, I've realized that every "modern" forum software has a distinct design that you can notice almost immediately. The one that is the least distinctive in my opinion is NodeBB, and even then, you know when a forum is running it.
I agree.
And you know what, out of every one of them I've used, NodeBB seems to be the easiest IMO. We need more designers... I'm just saying.
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@trevor Completely agree. NodeBB has one of the most straight-forward plugin (haven't checked themes yet) architectures I've ever seen. I'm rather new to Javascript and I can get rather far with my limited knowledge.
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UBB - ugh
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Glad to hear you guys appreciate the theme and plugin frameworks. If there's anything you think needs improving we're right here for ya, voluntolding @julian to take care of this for you. XD
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@trevor just curious, how was theming with discourse? they are technically speaking our "web 2.0" competitors although I see them more of like some kind of discussion software and not really an actual forum. if there's anything you liked from their setup that you think could be implemented here I'd be happy to try and figure that out
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@julian said:
We need to get the word out there to theme designers and the like... once we have a couple themes under our belt, we could post NodeBB to various design forums/subreddits... (think)
I can photoshop/illustrator themes all day but im still trying to figure out the coding side. Driving me crazy not knowing how to edit things yet. Im seeing things in need of tweaking all over but all i can do is complain. Gah.
Id reach out to some themeforest guys. Theres a fair amount of talent on that website.
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@psychobunny said:
@trevor just curious, how was theming with discourse? they are technically speaking our "web 2.0" competitors although I see them more of like some kind of discussion software and not really an actual forum. if there's anything you liked from their setup that you think could be implemented here I'd be happy to try and figure that out
Well it wasn't as robust as I'd like. As you can see, almost every Discourse site looks around 85% factory-like (aesthetically of course). I attempted to make it unique. Besides it having a custom CSS editor, it's still not as easy as this. That was one of my main concerns and why I switched to NodeBB in the first place. It was a no brainer. Where it took me a month and some change make that, it took me 1 and a half weeks to make convoe and another week of refining (AND IM CAUGHT UP WITH THE COMMITS, BOOYAH!)
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yeah I'm totally on board with that idea, I mean if I had somebody photoshop a layout for every tpl I could probably build that theme in a few days
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@trevor said:
I can't wait to see what you have planned for that @psychobunny
yeah me too
personal goal of mine is to get a NodeBB port of that off the ground. I was just looking around the net for a phpbb forum that still uses RPG system. Gaia Online got off phpbb and ran their own thing eventually so they don't count anymore. One of my old friends catghost is still amazingly running her community today, and this is easily 10 years old...Unfortunately she has her forum locked down so you'd have to register to actually play around. I have to admit that her forum home page was an inspiration for our multi column homepage layout. Was a totally new concept back then... everybody other forum software has by default a single column layout for their home page.
As for the plugin... In a nutshell you earn money from posting in forums and/or battling monsters or other forum users, and then you buy equipment and dress up your avatar. Equip these items and defeat others in battle, join guilds, explore zones (everything including maps configurable in the ACP). Gain raw materials from activities like fishing, mining, and then craft items with skills like blacksmithing and enchanting. For the casual user they're usually happy enough gaining gold and xp from posting but the real gamification comes from users battling each other.
All in all an amazing plugin in its day and I can't wait to see a modern NodeBB version of this. In fact, if anybody has any PHP experience and is interested in helping me port over the code, I'd love to talk to you
