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.

@gotwf I'm not sure if it matters if Docker isn't the "best" container solution. Docker has become the defacto standard for containerization.

@scottalanmiller said in Which is better NodeBB or Discourse?:

What sending mechanism are you using? Local SMTP? A service? We use MailGun and haven't seen an issue yet.

The out of memory may have been an independent issue. We use Sparkpost (as mentioned in the other thread).

@scottalanmiller said in Bounced emails:

@djensen47 said in Bounced emails:

Any thoughts here? Anybody? Is there any user setting or database record that basically says, "do not send mail to this account?"

Yes, my users control this for themselves.

But if the email is bouncing; I don't want to leave it to the user who may never actually come back. I have a user base of 12k going back as far as 2003.

@baris Okay, I think I'll go with changing the settings. Even if it's bouncing, I need the old email address for … reasons.

@baris Thanks this is super helpful!

Is there a way to "invalidate" an email (e.g., when a new user has registered but has not confirmed their email)? Would that stop emails from being sent?

Any thoughts here? Anybody? Is there any user setting or database record that basically says, "do not send mail to this account?"

Setting it to more than 2 hours after the original time seemed to work.

I tried to change the digest hour in the ACP to +1 hour and bounced the server. Nothing seems to be happening. Thoughts?

The same digest hour is used for daily, weekly, and monthly, correct?

For the first time reader of all of this, it is important to note that despite the digest email issue, the team is super responsive and receptive to every other issue. Especially when it is a well defined problem, the team turns around very quickly. I've logged a ton of bugs and nearly all of them get fixed and nearly all within a week of reporting. Priorities are priorities and this might be occurrence problem.

One thing to add to the list is the lack of reliability of sending the digest email to a moderate or larger user base. I have 12,000 users and have successfully sent 7/20 digest emails.

To the teams credit, one issue related to this has been resolved. Thank you for that.

Today, however, NodeBB ran out of memory. It appears this while it was getting ready to send the digest. The server crashed and the digest was not sent. The smallest error happens related or unrelated to the digest and it just doesn't start nor finish. And there is no way to resume or resend to those who did not receive it. The solution? Wait a week or wait until the "underlying issue" is resolved.

Update, possibly irrelevant:
The team does not believe this to be an resolvable (nor important enough) issue so it will not be resolved. (That's an opinion and their decision and that's fine). If you're looking for reliable weekly digest, you need to seriously consider something else besides NodeBB. I don't want this to be true but it just isn't a priority for them. (Development teams have a lot of issues pulling them in different directions; so you have to set some sort of priorities and some things get left out, this just happens to be one of them.)

I don't know if Discourse is better on this point but I am on a few Discourse forums that definitely have 10s of thousands of members and I get the email every week.