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

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

I personally hate Discourse due to their docker wrapper. but thats me.

Oh gosh, that would pretty much turn me away right there. Docker is great for devs, but makes little sense for production operations. Tends to come from shops that are run by devs and have little operational knowledge or experience. We just had a discussion about that last week in our forum: https://mangolassi.it/topic/19577/docker-for-production-use-of-third-party-software/

Docker is for lamers who don't know how to be system admins

And, of course, rapid development. When Docker first started making it's appearance I embraced it but was later aghast when folks started routinely deploying to production, and predicted to some buddies that some security nightmares were just around the corner... And they were.

But enough Docker bashing. I looked at Discourse long, long ago, in a far away galaxy (well, in Internet time, anyways). Ruled it out right away for following (admittedly highly opinionated) reasons:

• Docker centric: Now that I am primarily only on my own projects, I am free to abandon Linux in favor of what I consider to be superior OS's like FreeBSD and SmartOS. Nothing personal but platform lockin equates to vendor lockin. And that just ain't freedom enough for me

• Rails vs. NodeJS: Are you kidding? Was an early adopter of Rails back, circa 2003/4 or so? It rocked at that time as an alternative to then php stuff sporting the serious security hole of the day/week. Or so it seemed - php was pretty sketchy for a while there. Fast forward a decade and a half and it's freakin' no contest! Rails is all but history/legacy, at least in my mind.

• Main Dev Heads: Cool vs kind arrogant asshats (sounds like that may have changed). This was immediately off putting and I was kind of surprised Discourse became so popular, but I guess that's one thing fame will help you with.

So... note to the NodeBB devs:

Please do keep doing what YOU do best and do not worry too much about feature parity w/what, in my view, is an inferior, non starter platform just because they've got a few extra bells, whistles, and/or mindshare. Popularity more oft than not does NOT equal technical superiority but rather merely demonstrates whos' the better con men. Err.. marketing team....

Now obviously I do not mean to preclude a bit of cross pollination when it makes sense. But I have been around long enough to observe FOSS project loose their vision in the quest for "Feature Parity" with some perceived competition. So, just weighing in w/my $0.02 to encourage you to stay true to your vision. Cuz it's been workin' pretty good fer' me ;D

And finally, in closing, the astute may have noticed I enjoy making tongue in cheek comments from time to time for the humor value. Don't get yer' beak too tweaked, eh? It's not a religion for me.

@rivalite said in nodebb allows users to change the skin and save this appearance?:

.. snip...

Hello, I just discover nodebb.
I have a few questions:
1.nodebb allows change the skin like Discourse?

Admin Control Panel -> Appearance -> Themes/Skins.

Four themes shipped. Sixteen or so skins.

2.Also, I just realize nodebb uploaded my image attached to this post, to imgur. I have to pay on imgur or somewhere for this feature?

No. You can host your images locally. Offloading to imgur is a possibility, but not necessity.

3. is there a free spanish translation?

No clue.

4.how many free skins are available?

No clue. Sixteen included w/default install. At least on 12.x

5. Is it possible migrate from xenforo 2.x ?

Probably. But likely to be a headache for the uninitiated. You may want to explore contracting some expertise.

6.I just signup here using an email from https://temp-mail.org/ . Is there a spam filter to don't allow users signup with https://temp-mail.org/ ? This spam filter is free?

No clue w.r.t. temp-mail.org. NodeBB does include some more generic protections. See e.g. nodebb-plugin-spam-be-gone.

Thanks so much!

You're welcome. Enjoy!

Just an update to note that I've bailed on SmartOS and PostgreSQL due to too many bumps in the road in favor of sticking with a well supported platform. Which pretty much translates to: "what the dev heads are using...".

I use fbsd for our in house stuff that I keep updated via build server and internal lan. When I need cloud scale smartos or linux are the best options. To wit I have not even tried fbsd and pgsql so cannot weigh in there.

Thanks for all the insights. I'll probably be back to bug ya' before too long.

o/

Spot on Julian. You have discovered something many have known for decades but lacked the discipline and/or capability to practice in ever increasingly hectic world full of deadlines, phb demands, etc. Be interesting case study to observe uptake now that it has a cool name. Seriously.

I shall echo your sentiments wholeheartedly. Wanna really bend yer' noodle? Go smart phone free for a few days. Then a week.... Semi retired here and not carried one for a few years now. Very liberating to be free and I have had more than a few confide that they envy me. Having recouped more time you now have time to make plans, think creatively, etc.

It has long been a personal mantra of mine to read some print material regularly. Internet only tends to make one's concentration a bit too hyper after a period. Yer' brain needs longer articles and chapter books.

Try it. You might like it.

Much thanks to @scottalanmiller for the advice and an embarrassing amount of hand holding. I'm now rocking an nginx tls proxied nodebb sporting Centos7, mongodb, and redis for session management.

@omega said in automatic temporary ban of a troll user with minus X votes:

@gotwf said in automatic temporary ban of a troll user with minus X votes:

First off: Lot of good discourse in this thread. Lame pun intended.

@omega said in automatic temporary ban of a troll user with minus X votes:

....

Disagree w/above though. Too much added complexity. KISS.

Tough crowd, always with the tomatoes... try this one:

Let the Mods be Mods, let the Users be Users and Admins be King & Queen, forum developers could be Heros!

Granted it's more BOWIE than KISS but you get the point right?

Oooh, la, la!!! Good one. Yeah, I'll take Bowie. Had the good fortune to see Bowie live way back in the day. Spectacular showman. Indeed. Followed Stevie Nicks. But I digress....

Maybe you missed that I got your point. At least w.r.t. the root causes of the issue. My point is that AI is not the solution for all things because AI, by its very nature, lends itself to becoming gamified and one consequently finds themselves in a never ending bot arms race.

A community needs to behave like an actual community and help the good guys do their jobs policing the bad guys. We need the human factor because we need the human touch and human oversight. And hopefully some human hard won wisdom as well.

The larger the community the more mods, etc. required. We all get that many lurk, fewer post, fewer yet are active contributors..... But hopefully.... on a prayer and one wing... good mods and helpers emerge. And it seems they will, in my experience, but it takes time - needs to develop organically and no real short cuts.

In the meanwhile... are we able to make a knob that actually works for that? With us rather than against us? Tough cookie, for sure.

Oh and can we have a better grammar-typo bots for my posts...

No.

I'm curious to know if any nodebb gurus are serving up nodebb via nginx https enabled reverse proxy and using modsecurity?

@ben-coyle2 No, I don't think you are being stupid or dim. Apparently there are gremlins afoot here. Post up your nginx config, eh?

@djensen47 I did take a quick gander - looks like it drags in a bunch of Google depends. Not everybody is keen on the Goog these days.

Be that as it may; You did not actually answer my question. I don't have a big issue w/forum spam and the stuff I do have enabled seems to be coping. Knock on wood. The few addresses I did check were flagged by each, the bad was missed by each, although emailrep.io seems to be a fair bit more aggressive in giving somewhat dubious reps to known clean addresses. Hence my initial impression based on an admittedly very short look does not leave me particularly enthused as I'd prefer to risk false negatives than false positives.

So, I would be curious to know just what "niche" this targets. Not that having more options is not a good thing. I would be curious if you have done any compare/contrast evaluation on your end cuz I am open to new data. And if it's cool mostly because it's new and offers promise then that is okay too.

Edit: Heh, now I neglected your question and that you need to ask it pretty much answers mine about the testing on your end. I'll have to refresh my memory on that and get back to you, else probably some staff has it off the top of their head sooner...

@julian If so, please give me a knob for opting out of the additional stuff. Which seems to be nodebb's approach in general w.r.t. stuff like this and just dandy by me.

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

With vastly more people becoming aware of privacy concerns, ever more increasing numbers of people transitioning to VPN's, along with the plethora of free VPN providers coming online nowadays, one take any such stats with a large dose of salt, eh?

One reason I put little to no stock in "analytics". These days.

@Evg-R Welcome to NodeBB

I am not noting anything awry config side and suspect your nodebb instance is unable to connect to your mongodb.

1. I presume mongod is up and running?
2. Have you confirmed mongod is indeed listening on port 27017 on the localhost, e.g.:

[nodebb@forums]/opt/nodebb% netstat -na | grep -i listen| grep 27017
tcp        0      0 127.0.0.1:27017         0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN     
unix  1      [ ACC ]     STREAM     LISTENING     38436    /tmp/mongodb-27017.sock

[nodebb@forums]~% netstat -na | grep 4567
tcp        0      0 127.0.0.1:4567          0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN     

3. If so, have you confirmed that you are able to connect to mongod via cli as your nodebb user?

4. If so... try launching nodebb w/the --log flag, e.g.:

./nodebb -l start

Watch the messages that scroll by, eh? Then recheck what's happening on port 27017, should be something like:

[nodebb@forums]/opt/nodebb% netstat -na | grep 27017
tcp        0      0 127.0.0.1:64581         127.0.0.1:27017         ESTABLISHED
tcp        0      0 127.0.0.1:27017         127.0.0.1:64581         ESTABLISHED
tcp        0      0 127.0.0.1:58933         127.0.0.1:27017         ESTABLISHED
tcp        0      0 127.0.0.1:27017         127.0.0.1:58933         ESTABLISHED
tcp        0      0 127.0.0.1:61451         127.0.0.1:27017         ESTABLISHED

Good luck and have fun!

@PitaJ said in moderated? your post is queued for approval.:

@cregox your reputation is low because community members are downvoting your posts in other threads.

So the post queue is being activated. And the new user limiter.

There is no notification for when people downvote your posts. If you'd like that to change you can open an issue on GitHub

Not keen on this idea as it may well result in unintended consequences, e.g. "down vote wars".

Initially I wanted to know such details and wondered why such had been cloaked. I figured the devs must have had a good reason for it, as since we have upvote notifications I doubted it was an oversight. So I rolled with it. Experienced the NodeBB experience fer' a bit. Now I see the wisdom in maintaining some anonymity for down voters. It is rare I down vote but when I do I do so honestly as an effort to cue the poster that they may want to give further pause/analysis of their utterances. Alas, there are some petty people out there. Also trolls just looking to game the up/down vote system. No need to make it any more easier and/or amusing for them to escalate disagreements all out of proportion, mole hills becoming mountains, etc. Thus, I think anonymity for down votes is a good thing.

@nmeadows Cool. Glad you got it sorted.

And that is a smart idea.

@scottalanmiller Moreover, many forums are used as knowledge bases, tech support, etc. and hence do not tolerate "social media gossip", striving instead to diligently cultivate a very high signal to noise ratio to save end users/customers from having to sift thru a buttload of drivel.

So, while Scuttlebutt, the protocol, at least upon cursory glance, piques my interest on the geek front, I also do not see how it would replace current backend db's.

@nmeadows Indubitably. I am retired old dinosaur. Did some devops in my day a'la Salt and Chef but that predated Kubernetes so I've no clue. But at least now you have pinpointed the link in the chain that is failing and where to focus future troubleshooting efforts. Good job.

@PitaJ I mistyped. I am not on 13.x yet either.

@Listen I am not on 14.x yet so some of those icons are unfamiliar to me. What is the tool tip when you hover on the icon? How about the one to the right of it, sporting the up arrow? Might that second one be "upload image" (as contrasted with "Picture")?

That last error message is because you do not have a favicon, wh/you'd upload via the ACP.

@cregox said in Some questions :

but i'll bite. my masochistic self, that is. below is my last play on this topic for the foreseeable future.

.... big snippage ....

nope. i didn't. and i'm positive nobody is really understanding each other here (myself above all, of course), although we are all trying to spell every word on our mind while silently reading through, at some level.

Perhaps you may want to invest some energies in reading comprehension. Being able to decode and understand the symbols of a second language does not necessarily equate to comprehending and it seems there may be an issue here.

in my level, i stopped reading full posts at my previous one.

How then, may one reply intelligently? Just cherry picking out bits here and there? Context can be everything when it comes to comprehension.

When I read your posts, I actually read them. You seem to have a pretty decent vocabulary but I find myself confused as to what seems to be "word play". I do not speak anything other than US English. I am aware that other languages conjugate things differently, but I still find a significant bit of what you write challenging to grok. Hence, I find myself actually reading many of them twice.

@abhinov-singh I have not seen any such but I am not updated to 14.x either. Regardless, potential helpers will likely want to know:

1. What version of NodeBB
2. What version NodeJS?
3. Safe to presume you're using MongoDB?
4. Safe to presume you're proxying via nginx?
5. Anything your end that may have changed 'twixt working as expected and not.

Good luck! o/

@א-ש

Perchance might there be any firewall rules blocking egress initiated connections w/google? Are you able to connect up to the goog maually, via cli? Low hanging fruit to test.