I saw another discussion "DISCOURSE IS BETTER" but that's not very productive. Instead let's look at what each does better than the other.

I'm posting this under feature requests because that is where I hope this conversation leads.

NodeBB is better

• Front page. Hands down, it's more fun to browse the magazine style front page. Is it more usable? I don't know but if it keeps time-on-site up and click-throughs high, I don't care if it is less usable if it increases engagement.
• Setup. Have you seen or followed the instructions for Discourse? Yikes.
• Scalability/Performance. It's not religion, it's just true, Node.js scales better and more easily. Yes, Rails is scalable but it just takes more work and ops time. I want to run my forum not worry about running Rails.
• Topic list page. There area similarities between the two but NodeBB leave more space in the side bar for other information about the site. And potentially plugins or ads?
• Tags. Last I checked, the Discourse team was vehemently against tags. I like them or at the very least the option to have them.
• Ease of theme modification. I actually cannot confirm this but it is supposed to be a core tenet of NodeBB so it wins for at least trying. I did look at Convoe and it looks great!

Discourse is better

• Email integration. No question here. The Discourse digest is superior. NodeBB doesn't even have email alerts. Discourse even allows you to respond to an email alert and have it post directly to the forum.
• Posting a new message/topic. I think Discourse has a slight upper hand here. The help tab in NodeBB is not very helpful. In Discourse, when posting a new topic you can change the category. I think the NodeBB transparent background is distracting.
• Title bar. This one might be contentious but I don't understand what or why all of those buttons are at the top. I never touch them.
• Ease of reading. Fixed width posts are easier to read. Browser edge to browser edge is not comfortable on the eyes. Period. (I guess you can customize this but I think the default should be fixed/responsive.
• Meta-data about posts/links.etc. I think this is very interesting differentiator for Discourse. It's almost like Github issues when you link between different issues. The number of clicks for a link is also really nice.

Neither is better

• Search. Discourse search in the toolbar is nifty but I like search results page. The search result page on NodeBB isn't as useful as the results you get from a Discourse search. When I search NodeBB I rarely understand the results. Update: search results on NodeBB are really good now and a slight edge over Discourse because they are on a page and not a dropdown.
• Mobile. It's good enough on both.

I don't know

I haven't explored all areas of both. Any thoughts on

• Plugin development? I suspect NodeBB wins here.

What is preventing me from installing NodeBB right now.

1. Email integration
2. Titlebar

Update 12:10pm PDT: Added customizability to "NodeBB is better"

Here's what I ended up using:

// Change the icon for votes
span.votes {
    // not voted is outline heart
    .fa-chevron-up:before {
        content: "\f08a";        
    }
    // upvoted is solid heart
    .upvoted .fa-chevron-up:before {
        content: "\f004";
    }
}

And it works as expected:

For what it's worth, I ended up going with NodeBB.

Node + MongoDB (or Redis) just makes life so much easier than Rails. The plugin system here is great. I have no regrets I think what this team has done is awesome!

So for me it's solved. NodeBB is better.

1.11.0 was a great release, fixed a ton of bugs and the new traffic graph is great.

@Michael-Pfaff Oh, cool. I guess my plugin is still working?
I found this thread looking for a dice roller and I guess mine is one of the few so I guess I'll have to keep working on it.

Duplicate URLs

I was browsing webmaster tools and discovered that URLs in the sitemap are not the canonical URLs. This seems to cause confusion with the Google Indexer and for SEO purposes confusing the indexer is not a good idea:

Missing Trailing slash on subfolder

This is causing a 404 on maybe the most important page in the sitemap. Granted /forums/ is probably getting indexed no matter what but errors are errors and they're always bad for SEO.

Front page is set to weekly

Same image as above. The content on the categories page can change on a daily basis. Why is it set to weekly? Groups on the other hand rarely change.

I'd like both automatic as well as manually awarded badges. For instance, if you look at BoardGameGeek (a hideous but wildly popular forum), users can and do buy badges. I do something similar on my forum but I manually add the "purchased" badge.

The grouped by search result presentation is great. The results are also great. The problem that I'm having is that I don't know what to do when I get a search result.

Try #1: I clicked the name of the person who made a post. Not what I wanted.
Try #2: I clicked the avatar. Not what I wanted.
Try #3. I scanned around in the box and saw a non-descript piece of text labeled "posted." I wasn't sure it was what I wanted. It was.

The search idiom is not a new phenomenon. There are tried and true practices for returning search results. Can we stick to the current search results patterns that folks use on the internet instead of trying to re-invent the wheel, and poorly at that?

Thanks.

#my2cents

Note: for some reason, this post didn't appear to post the first time. Not sure what I did.

Even though this could be solved with better proxy rules. I'm wondering if it's also not being handled correctly on the server side as well.

1. Install a forum in a "subfolder" like /forums
2. Visit the homepage without a trailing slash: https://www.axisandallies.org/forums

Expected Result
The page loads fine

Actual Result
Receive the following error:

/forumscategories Not Found
You seem to have stumbled upon a page that does not exist. Return to the home page.

You can see the error here: https://www.axisandallies.org/forums

@julian No problem. I really like what NodeBB and Discourse are working on. I prefer NodeBB because I'd rather manage a node.js + mongodb stack than a RoR + prostgresql stack. So I'll be chiming in with my suggestions.

Uh, umm,

Our spam problem is only 5-7 spam accounts per week so I find that Spam filters have high recall but low precision; meaning a lot of false positives.

Does spam-be-gone put accounts in a moderation queue if they fail registration?

Just take a look at it. Throw a few emails in the search box and see what you get. Sure it could be gamed but the attacker would have to know about it and the spammers I've been seeing are going for quantity not quality. They're not going to set up LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Gravatar, and other accounts. It even checks account breaches as a data point.

Emailrep.io is currently a free service that evaluates the reputation of an email address.

I'm thinking the plugin could do a few things:

• High reputation: auto registration plus bonus (configurable) reputation points (e.g. skip some of those minimum thresholds)
• Medium reputation: auto registration but no bonus points
• Risky reputation: goes to the registration queue for manual processing

Thougths?

@julian As a followup, I received an email from Postmark. They basically told me that they prefer that customers manage their own lists. They're a transnational email provider not a service to maintain lists. I'm with them on this. It's the responsibility of the owner of the list to maintain the list. Right now NodeBB punts that to the email provider.

Looks like this line does the unsubscribe work:
https://github.com/NodeBB/NodeBB/blob/19b63bfaa7d14b48991c83ad6dc40f981d61b042/src/controllers/accounts/settings.js#L173

const readline = require('readline');
const fs = require('fs');
const notifications = require('./notifications');

const unsubscribeAll = async function (email) {
    const uid = await user.getUidByEmail(email.toLowerCase());
    if (!uid) return false;
    await user.setSetting(uid, 'dailyDigestFreq', 'off');
    await user.updateDigestSetting(uid, 'off');
    
    for (const type of notifications.baseTypes) {
        const current = await db.getObjectField('user:' + uid + ':settings', 'notificationType_' + type);
        await user.setSetting(uid, 'notificationType_' + type, (current === 'notificationemail' ? 'notification' : 'none'));   
    } 
    return true;
}



const rl = readline.createInterface({
    input: fs.createReadStream('emails.txt') //one email per line
});

rl.on('line', function(email) {
    let success = unsubscribeAll(email);
    console.log(`${email}: ${success ? '✔' : '❌'}`);
});

Notification types:
https://github.com/NodeBB/NodeBB/blob/0037a0388636a92765a3bb16f81dd121ca33e513/src/notifications.js#L20

The main thing I don't have are the various values for type. I'm guessing there is an array in the code somewhere.

The solution doesn't have to be complicated. I just need a way to "never send" email to certain old accounts.

This is the minimum I would like to see:

Unsubscribe all:

• One click link on emails (this is being developed as discussed)
• Upload a CSV list of emails to unsubscribe all
• A webhook to unsubscribe all when received from the transactional email provider.

Footer would be great.

I understand the workflow of email confirmation but you're missing the point. Even your community forum hasn't been around very long. And it certainly wasn't migrated from something that was running for 2 decades.

Being able to do this is a must have for email health. Email health is crucial to a forum community. I'm fairly certain the competition understands this.

Farming this out to providers is a problem because it consumes API calls driving up costs. Some providers don't even have a way for me to upload a suppression list. So I have to ruin my reputation with them in order to get the known old addresses in their system.

It's a bad look to not address bad emails with both the system generating (NodeBB) as well as sending (transactional email provider). Heck, what if Stop Forum Spam says an email address is spam, I still have zero way to deal with this. Email has been my number one frustration with NodeBB and continues to be.

I have about 3k email address that I just shouldn't be sending to but I have zero ways to deal with this.

Actually, by the looks of it, I need to take mine in a different direction.

It looks like this plugin does a sum and also produces output that is, sorry, user unfriendly. I need to count positive results not sum the values. Number of rolls above, or below a number.

I also want to introduce labels on rolls.

[dice(hits) infantry:3d6<=1 tanks:1d6<=3]

would output
infantry 3d6<=1: [2 3 1] 1 hits
tanks 1d6<=3: [2] 1 hits
total: 2 hits

Bummer. At least I didn't spend much time on fixing it yesterday. I did most of the work a few years ago.