This is pretty hacky but it's worked beautifully so far: I wrote a Ruby script that tries to load my page. If it fails, it restarts the server. This is run in a cron job every minute. Here's my code:

require 'net/http'

begin
	print "Downloading the page..."
	res = Net::HTTP.start("yourdomainhere.com", :read_timeout => 5)
	res.get('/')
	puts " success!"
rescue Net::ReadTimeout => e
	print " failed.\n\nRestarting the server..."
	`./nodebb restart`

	puts " success!"
end

Until the cause of this is figured out, this or something like it might be a good enough workaround. It sure beats me manually restarting it after my users throw a fit.

@julian I'll certainly give it a shot in my spare time--probably tomorrow night, during one of the usergroup meetings I attent. I'm a Rails guy for a living and I'm just kind of hacking my way through NodeJS land, and more specifically NodeBB.

I think most of the work involved will revolve around reproducing the error, since calls to translator without a param sent along the way so plainly work all over the rest of the software. Will be doing some research!

@L33t I set up a cron job so that it wouldn't be subject to the server resetting. I wanted it to be somewhat resilient in spite of its hackiness.

That said, this is just treating a symptom. I absolutely do not advocate for this approach on a permanent basis, only until the true cause has been revealed and addressed. It's the software engineers' equivalent of filling a hole in a dam with a big wad of gum. It buys you time. It doesn't solve the real issue.