@julian Yes, I have a lot of examples. I was thinking I would work through Harmony and submit PRs to it. Seems like the right thing to do. However, if you want to see for yourself, I think you should run this forum through the sitechecker.pro, it is very illuminating. In the last few weeks, I have learned a lot about how pages are viewed and processed by analytics platforms. For now, I have turned off analysis of my forum so I can hit my target score for the rest of my site. When I spin it up again, I will provide more details. I am also learning what portions of the forum I should hide from analyis/spiders.

@baris addressed one issue I found last week.

Challenges in SEO optimization, and related topics

@baris is this update to Harmony published already? And, do I just run an upgrade with npm or ./nodebb?

NodeBB Community (community.nodebb.org)

The other thing, front of mind, is there are some "category" links somewhere, and it appears to be a partial "/category/" which is a 404; my guess is that it receives context on click.

Canonical URLs are having some issues pretty broadly.

Page meta-tag descriptions are the same for almost every page.

Social Graph data has overlapping issues with the above two issues.

@phenomlab I check any nodebb work in with all my other code. That way I have code-styles and linting.

Generally, with nodeBB, there are a lot of improvements to be made. There are basically three categories of issues.

• hrefs that are partials until a click event happens, or in long threads too many repeated URLS to the users.
• metadata mismatches or missing metadata, particularly with either wrong or mismatched canonical URLs and missing social graph data.
• H-tags issues. (repeated, too short, too long)

Then, there are the challenges of maintaining historical data. Links go bad, non-https links, etc.

Some improvements could be made to improve this platform-wide, and I think most of it would be in updating the Harmony Theme, as most of the issues come from the markup itself.

If you want to become obsessed with way too many details:
https://sitechecker.pro/

If you want to be reasonable, this does an OK job:
https://www.seobility.net/en/seocheck/

@baris is this update to Harmony published already? And, do I just run an upgrade with npm or ./nodebb?

I will thank you, @baris . Yes, my forum runs as part of a larger site, so your assumptions were correct. I will let you know.

The thing that makes me the craziest here is the following:

The href is doing this:
/forum/forum/category/248/initiation

It is not visible; it seems to serve no function, but it is causing bad links in my site scans. Overall, it is relatively minor in score impact, but I do not know why it is happening, though I suspect a "window.location.path" is being used somewhere in the stack, and therefore "forum" gets tacked on. There are some other bad links here and there, but this is a big majority of them.

A much bigger concern is that the canonical URL for pretty much every page in the forums is incorrect. And the engines do not like that.

Outside of that, I have a bunch of old data with insecure and dead URLs in posts. I would like to be able to bulk edit based on patterns and checks, but we are discouraged from directly modifying data in Mongo. Any suggestions for mitigating this issue without removing direct links would be appreciated.

For now I have hardcoded these two lines in emailer.js:

src/emailer.js#L317-L318

NodeBB/src/emailer.js at master · NodeBB/NodeBB

Node.js based forum software built for the modern web - NodeBB/src/emailer.js at master · NodeBB/NodeBB

GitHub (github.com)

from: '[email protected]',
from_name: 'Organization Name Forums'

And with my specific values, it works. So something is amiss with:

from: meta.config['email:from'] || no-reply@${getHostname()},
from_name: meta.config['email:from_name'] || 'NodeBB',

but I do not know what. It could be I missed configuring something.

OK.... So I have added the _dmarc record and it has propagated.

To see if this could work I have setup a separate test using "nodemailer" with the following:

import nodemailer from 'nodemailer';

const mailit = (() => {
let transporter = nodemailer.createTransport({
host: 'smtp.HOST.EXT',
port: 465,
secure: true, // true for 465, false for other ports
auth: {
user: '[email protected]',
pass: 'XXXXXX', // Use the actual password
},
});

let mailOptions = {
from: '"Test" [email protected]',
to: '[email protected]', // Use a test Gmail address
subject: 'Hello from Node',
text: 'This is a test email.',
};

transporter.sendMail(mailOptions, (error, info) => {
if (error) {
console.log(error);
} else {
console.log('Email sent: ' + info.response);
}
});
})()

export default mailit;

And this sends successfully to the test Gmail account I am using, no hitches. Leaving a very real chance that whatever is going on within NodeBB is not quite right. I am not sure where to look for that script as of right now. But the successful nodemailer test makes it the next place I will need to look.

I did finally get a failure which is somewhat helpful, maybe the _dmarc will help this:

{ANaDDRESS}@gmail.com: host gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com[142.250.107.26] said:
550-5.7.1 [23.83.223.168] Messages missing a valid address in From: header,
or 550-5.7.1 having no From: header, are not accepted. For more
information, go to 550-5.7.1
https://support.google.com/mail/?p=RfcMessageNonCompliant and review 550
5.7.1 RFC 5322 specifications.
j2-20020aa78d02000000b006ea6d321d3bsi4398153pfe.89 - gsmtp (in reply to end
of DATA command)
Reporting-MTA: dns; relay.mailchannels.net
X-Postfix-Queue-ID: 3B6954C2AEC
X-Postfix-Sender: rfc822; {ANaDDRESS}@DOMAIN.EXT
Arrival-Date: Fri, 29 Mar 2024 23:22:31 +0000 (UTC)

Final-Recipient: rfc822; {ANaDDRESS}@gmail.com
Original-Recipient: rfc822;{ANaDDRESS}@gmail.com
Action: failed
Status: 5.7.1
Remote-MTA: dns; gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com
Diagnostic-Code: smtp; 550-5.7.1 [23.83.223.168] Messages missing a valid
address in From: header, or 550-5.7.1 having no From: header, are not
accepted. For more information, go to 550-5.7.1
https://support.google.com/mail/?p=RfcMessageNonCompliant and review 550
5.7.1 RFC 5322 specifications.
j2-20020aa78d02000000b006ea6d321d3bsi4398153pfe.89 - gsmtp

@phenomlab

There are:
@ TXT v=spf1........
_domainkey TXT v=DKIM1......

I do not see a "dmarc" entry.

We brought over our data from PHPBB, which has fallen way behind. We can write something up about how we approached the project.

I have never really done much with email in all my years of working on the web, and now I have a need. I have the NodeBB mailer setup with an SMTP email on my domain, and it works for pretty much everything except sending to Gmail accounts, and that is a problem.

I read:

https://community.nodebb.org/topic/15072/nodebb-email-options?_=1711731561044

It hits the high points but did not really help me on next steps. Is there a good guide for diagnosing and resolving issues? Or how to best setup an email provider to make sending more successful?

All input is appreciated.

It is suddenly working again, but I do not know why. I cannot get a consistent result. I will be grateful for now. Is there anything I should be looking for when it fails?

@julian it does not appear to be in the build folder. I have the plugin installed and activated according to the admin, I ran build emoji service, I ran build and restart, but it is not showing up.

@baris TY. Despite having been a JS developer for more than 10years I had never published my own npm package. Now I have. TY.

I have used the build emoji. I have stripped out the emojis and reinstalled them and then built them. Not sure what is going on.

I have never been so frustrated with the emoji plugins. The emoji plugin installs, and I get the :emoji: format tags. However, when I install the android plugin I only get broken images. I had them working one time, but cannot seem to get them to work again. I am frustrated with the process, especially since every time I install plugins, it wipes out my custom theme.

My theme works but this whole place it in node_modules thing is unstable. Is there a way to steal it so that I am not losing it all the time? Or do I need to get it into a repository so I can simply install it with npm?

@baris I did finally getting it working. There was some weird formatting in the code that was breaking things. Thank you for chiming in. The globalnav widget area would be awesome.