My feeling here is that a feature that lets users create groups and invite others goes a bit beyond the regular scope of a forum software - and the goal should always be to keep things as simple as possible.

For my personal case, an API would probably be the best solution since my sub-communities on the main site will not just get their own forums and group - they'll get their own services on the main site in addition. In the long run, I'd be integrating the NodeBB forums seamlessly into the main site eventually (but that's a bunch of years down the road, so not an issue for today).

@baris as far as I understand, you're looking for an extension to NodeBB that lets users do the group-creation and management inside NodeBB, right?

Thanks guys, it's awesome to hear that NodeBB can, in principle, handle this. I'll have a look at these embed plugins.

By now, I think that the biggest challenge is actually just figuring out how to allow the main site to create new forums and groups via an API. Since groups already behave as I hoped this looks like a very cost-effective effort. So I suppose the actual question worth asking is... how far along are your plans for a Web API?

I really appreciate how you keep things simple and focused.

Sounds like a good plan.

Hey,

I'm looking for a forum solution that integrates well with the site I'm currently building. Until now I had planned to roll my own (basic) solution. However, NodeBB seems pretty awesome and it provides the needed OAuth support that would easily let me integrate both sites. Still, there's a bunch of questions on my mind now.

I need a solution where I can have a handful of "main boards" that are visible to all users. In addition to that, users on my site will be able to form their own sub-communities and these sub-communities need their own forums (which I'd also love to power with NodeBB). Basically, I suppose that this is a pretty extreme use case for forums.

• Any suggestions how I should go about achieving that? If I had an API on NodeBB that lets me create sub-forums when a user creates a new sub-community on the main site, that would do the trick, I suppose.
• I could possibly add every sub-community as a group on NodeBB. Is it currently possible to restrict visibility of certain forums to certain user groups in NodeBB? Would that be a reasonable use of groups in NodeBB?

The second thing I need in my forums is the ability for users to place smart links to items on the main site (imagine a shopping site where people can ask in the forums for a specific product and an employee or simply another user can respond with a product thumbnail as part of their response).
I suppose that could be done as a NodeBB plugin. That plugin would either

• query a Web API on the main site to retrieve the data for the product thumbnails (either at the time of posting or at the time of Markup rendering), or
• generate client-side JavaScript that loads the product thumbnail widgets from the main page after the forum thread has already loaded in the browser (obviously, that would be worse from a latency point of view, but it might be simpler to implement since I need "product thumbnail widgets" for embedding into blog posts of my users anyways)
  Any comments or suggestions on that? These are just two ways of doing this that come to my mind, I'm sure there are more. Maybe you can think of a better way? Any existing plugins that do something conceptually similar?

I'm not too scared of modifying NodeBB's source code to my needs despite having never used NodeJS before. However, if there is a way I can stay compatible with NodeBB upgrades, I'd definitely want to stay on that route.

Any case, I'd be totally happy if you can help me decide whether this is the forum I'm looking for and if you can give me a few hints how you think it would be easiest to achieve what I need.