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.

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

@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.

I recently updated the dice-bot plugin to 1.1.0

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.

@baris Thank you! With the knowledge of that query in mind, I made this aggregate:

I usually prefer aggregates for complex queries like this. Plus I can also get a count of the posts by user too.

db.objects.aggregate([{
    $match: {_key: "posts:pid", score: { $gte:  d }}
},{
    $addFields: {"pk": {$concat: ["post:", "$value"]}}
},{
    $lookup: {
        from: "objects",
        let: { "postKey": "$pk"},
        pipeline: [
            {$match: {$expr: {$eq: ["$_key", "$$postKey"]}}},
        ],
        as: "post"
    }
},{
    $project: {post: {$arrayElemAt: ["$post", 0]}}     
}, {
    $project: {_id: 0, uid: "$post.uid"}
},{
    $group: {_id: "$uid", count: {$sum: 1}}
}]);

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.

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

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!

1. I clicked on a link in the alerts.
2. Started reading the conversation.
3. Forgot the topic.
4. Didn't see the topic title anywhere convenient.

I really like the approach that Discourse takes by putting the title in the title/nav bar. Recent, popular, hot posts is nice but knowing the name of the site and/or the topic you are reading.

I'll have to be honest, I was a little confused by the recent topics link. I clicked it and thought, "I never replied to any of these topics." I quickly realized the error in my assumption.

@baris said:

Hmm, you could still use Topics.reply and after the post is made set the lastposttime property of the bot user to Date.now() - tenSeconds so it won't be rate limited.

That and using SocketHelpers instead of Socket.in worked like a charm. The bot response is basically instant.

I think I've seen this feature on other forum software (Discourse maybe) and definitely on Stack Exchange. You basically are not allowed to tag a topic unless the tag already exists.

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

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.

The dropdown configuration has been driving me crazy for the past 2 days. I can't find anything I want including any reference to privileges. How do I set up a moderator? Somebody who is not an admin.

I had to hit errors until I figured out that I need to include this URL on the OAuth settings:

{url}/auth/facebook/callback

That url is not documented anywhere as far as I could see. I even dug around here a bit (maybe not long enough). So I would think the instructions should be documented somewhere so we don't have to guess these URLs.

I've attached a screen shot. The title in the titlebar really should be on the left. You might have to move around all of the icons, etc. to make it happen but I think the title is more important that the icons.