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.

To show off the customizability, I think it would be great for NodeBB to ship with at least two themes. Similar to Ghost or Wordpress. (Unless it already does then I'll have to eat my ) I haven't tried setting it up in many many

I recently updated the dice-bot plugin to 1.1.0

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.

Since this is related to bugs, I thought I would post it here (and not Github).

I'm not sure what the NodeBB team does for regression testing but forum-in-subdirectory seems to break something every few releases. If you have a test suite or regression testing setup, I would suggest a copy of that for forum-in-subdirectory.

Thanks for listening!

I recently updated the dice-bot plugin to 1.1.0

Somehow it was uninstalled. Weird.
There was also a bug in the code. Maybe a node.js version issue.

I think it's something else but I am seeing this error in the logs:

error: Error: ENOENT: no such file or directory, open '/var/srv/nodebb/node_modules/nodebb-plugin-require/plugin.json'   

@pitaj said in Breaking change for plugins:

Which probably means spinning up a dev instance and going through each version.

Honestly, this sounds like a waste of time.

I'll just figure it out myself. Thanks anyway.

@pitaj No errors. No, I cannot identify which major version broke it.

I migrated one version at a time but all in one sitting.

I combed through the release notes and I likely missed the breaking change to plugins. But I can't find the change that would've broken my plugin here: https://github.com/djensen47/nodebb-plugin-dice-bot

It worked on 1.12 and breaks in 1.16

Thanks in advance!

@julian Yeah, I might have somebody in mind.

I did a massive migration 2 years ago and as a result nearly everybody in the system was set to "weekly" as the default digest setting. I also have emails the as so old they will bounce.

1. What query/script could I run to change all the weekly values to system default?
2. Given a list of email addresses, what query or script could I run to change the digest value to none or whatever "off" would be.

Thanks in advance.

Since this is related to bugs, I thought I would post it here (and not Github).

I'm not sure what the NodeBB team does for regression testing but forum-in-subdirectory seems to break something every few releases. If you have a test suite or regression testing setup, I would suggest a copy of that for forum-in-subdirectory.

Thanks for listening!

@baris Yeah my browser tab icon looks really chunky right now.

Aside: Stay tuned for one and possibly numerous bugs related to my forum being in a subdirectory.