Depends, if you're doing largely front-end code (like embedding an iFrame to some chat application) then a widget works best. If you want to modify the API or save things into the database, then a plugin is right for you. I think your best bet is to figure out what you need to do, and then find a plugin that does something similar, and modify that plugin, or take code from it (it's open source afterall ;))

I use mongo so I have to follow a different approach to unlock my account launch your mongo cli, switch to the nodebb db and run db.objects.remove({"_key":"lockout:YOUR_UID"}) uid is usually 1 for admin If you don't know what your uid is you can run db.objects.remove({"_key": { $regex: /lockout:.*/ }}) to unlock all locked accounts Becareful when doing this as I'm not sure if it would have any other side effects I'm not aware of. It's only meant to be a quick way restore order if you keep locking yourself out during dev

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