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

ys.

Thank you all for the great support you are giving My currenct hosting contract runs until june next year so this gives me some time to get acquainted with NodeBB.

I'm now looking into writing some simple plugins but I'm starting from scratch so still some learning to be done. But this is off-topic I think

Anyways, I have discovered that NodeBB is indeed very fast. So that is certainly a plus to choose it.
And your support is top notch too, I get answers when I ask a question.

Perhaps a few 'to be improved' would be to have a decent plugin database (even though I can search for them from inside the ACP) and some more themes.

The question you need to ask yourself is why you would like to impersonate a user?

• list itemIs it because you want to recreate an error the user has? Just ask him if you can logon to his account and temporarily change his password to do so. You don't need any additional plugins to do this and the user knows you are accessing his account.
• Do you want to read his private messages? Why would you do this? Here (in Belgium) it's illegal. For two reasons :
  ** it's considered as private information and thus you're not allowed to read it. It's simply illegal.
  **Another reason is GDPR : you only can access user information if it's relevant to do so and only for the duration that it's relevant. No way you can justify reading his private messages.

In case of abuse or more serious illegal activity by the user, let's say he/she's trolling other members, you'll get this information from other concerned users and can act according to this information. It's your perogative as administrator to ban users based on their behaviour on your website.
And if the user really does illegal stuff like insinuating or distributing child pornography (I know heavy example), you're legally obliged to report this to the authorities. Not doing so makes you an accomplice, at least here in Belgium.

So in my book, there's no reason at all to impersonate a user. And if anybody reports abuse and provides the necessary proof, I'll act according to the forum's rules and if needed according to the Belgian law.

Even though I'm new to NodeBB and I even never used Discourse (except a demo), I want to share my opinion on this question.
First, let me do a quick introduction : I'm running a relatively small forum (3500 members) in Belgium since about 12 years. In that time we moved the forum respectively from yourbb.be to phpBB, MyBB, SMF and finally Woltlab (paying).
At several moments, we also looked at both Discourse and NodeBB but you both lack a simple install procedure for a shared hosting provider (in my case vimexx.be). In fact, there's no way to install your application there at all! And it's a real pity that it's not the case because NodeBB is a very good forum platform. Defenitely better than phpBB, MyBB and SMF and certainly cheaper than Woltlab. I just managed to install NodeBB on my linux desktop and have been playing for the last few days with it and so far these are the pro's and con's I see :

pro:

• The acp is very good and clear to use. As administrator, I can very easily find all the bells & whistles available.
• Installing plugins is actually very easy and can be done directly from the acp without having to down/upload data packages via ftp
• I like the endless scrolling and the overall layout of the forum itself is great. You also have quite a lot of possibilities as a user to decide what and how you get informed on activity.
• The email digest feature is something that doesn't exist on Woltlab unless you buy an additional package.
• In fact, even though you have less plugins to choose from, most of them are free. That there are plugins that are no longer supported don't bother me that much, the same is the case for Woltlab.

Con's :

• Default markdown or bbcode : this is to my opinion a bit outdated. But it's not that big a deal because I found a (free) plugin to enable HTML formatting. Don't underestimate this feature because the average forum user is not an IT expert but an average Joe who just wants to talk about a topic (in my case homebrewing).
• There's no automatic resizing of images. In Woltlab, I can copy/paste an image directly into a post and it will be resized to a format I setup in the ACP. This option boosts the usage of images when asking questions or replying to them. A picture is worth more than a thousand words
• As said, the installation process is very complicated and even impossible on shared hosting. News flash : a lot of us forum owners are on a shared hosting

However, I am enjoying the discovery of NodeBB and I'm sure that I'll find a solution for most of my problems. Great work