Move this as you see fit.

I set up a site for 55+ year olds, many of whom are not really great at technology. The common complaint is that the site is very complex to use.

They don’t get the categories display at all. It’s obviously useful and important, but I ended up changing the default homepage to recent posts. This has helped a bit.

I initially set the default notifications to not email, and I regret it. Everything should be notified be email and people should opt out. The emails are critical to keep the users engaged. I would love a feature that lets me change the settings for everyone in one place, unless they have already changed a setting (e.g. change a setting but don’t override user’s choice). Without the feature, I have to use the mongosh tool to modify the settings, and it is not what I really want to do.

The verification of emails seems broken. I am not requiring the users to enter emails. I am moderating new users. I verify the IP is one I want to allow and validate the email address in admin control panel. The users are getting emails asking them to click on a link to confirm their email address, but they are being taken to a 404 page. It is confusing the users. I don’t want them to be getting the emails at all. When I validate the email addresses manually, I want the user to get a welcome email. When the user registers and gets into the moderation queue, I want them to receive an email saying, “your account is created, you will receive the welcome email when you are allowed to post.”

They do not understand the icon buttons on the left and right toolbars. If I explain to them how they can click on the expand >> button, they will see the choices with the text. I want a global setting to set to expanded initially. As the user base matures, I want to be able to disable the feature.

The post editor is really problematic. If the user clicks on new topic, the editor blocks the entire middle of the page, between the toolbars. When the click on buttons in the toolbars, the editor stays in front of everything. The user does not see the discard button and they are completely lost.

There is no way to watch a category and get emails when new topics and/or posts are made there. We have a category for alerts (bad weather, home burglary, wild animals present/protect your pets…). I want allowed groups to be able to post an alert topic and have the alert sent to everyone. I want a person not in the group to be able to post and the moderators and admins get notified and are able to approve or effect sending the email to everyone. Maybe this should be a plugin, but I think it’s more of a core feature. I am using the newsletter plugin, but it’s not the same. In fact, I would love to be able to integrate SMS for the really important notifications.

A consistent complaint is that the people are already on a majordomo style email list (like a Google group) and they just want the emails to trigger them to react on the site. The users also use Nextdoor.com and have no problems with it.

When you first visit the site, the login or register options really need to be giant and front and center right away. The tiny iconic buttons are way too easy to ignore. I am publicizing the site’s URL and people are visiting and not figuring out how to sign up. I don’t want to publicize the registration URL - people may already be signed up…

I’m not posting this to be a jerk. I personally think NodeBB is the best platform I have used in my 25 years of running forums. I’m just passing on the feedback from my users - needs to be more idiot friendly!

I’m using NodeBB to run a collaborative site for residents of a 55+ (seniors) community.

@josef said in Feedback from my users:

@mschwartz said in Feedback from my users:

Is there a way to have them show on every post all the time?

[component="post/actions"] {
    opacity: 1 !important
}

Thank you!

@omega said in Why Do Users Sign up?:

Why do users sign up?

I could preamble and preface this with something but I won't, the simpler the better.

I want to support your efforts

I have been running a sports site since 2007. It went from vBulletin to XenForo during that time. The migration process was not painless- it took me a week of practice and hours for each export/import run…

I have one highly successful and popular forum (category) that gets about 500,000 views per month. The analytics shows that at peak times (big news days), probably 1/3 of the visitors are signed in. I have posters with 50,000 posts, so I don’t think it’s hard to do.

I think it’s just people like to read but participate no further.

XenForo does a better job at nagging people to sign up than NodeBB - I had to add custom HTML widget to do the nagging, where it is built into XenForo.

As a base platform, I like NodeBB much better.

But as a sports site, one of the popular activities is a “game thread” where we have hundreds of users posting to the one topic in real time as they are watching the game. Constant reloads and hundreds of posts and many potential posts at the same time. I don’t know how well NodeBB would handle it…

@josef said in Feedback from my users:

@mschwartz said in Feedback from my users:

Is there a way to have them show on every post all the time?

[component="post/actions"] {
    opacity: 1 !important
}

Worked like a champ. I’m truly dealing with computer illiterate people. I’m exchanging text messages and emails explaining “tap on the post and these buttons appear” with before and after screenshots. They don’t get it.

The constant complaints are that the site is too hard to use and not intuitive. A small fix like this goes a long way.

Thanks again “

Thanks!

EDIT:

I inserted two emojis using the keyboard on my iPad in the quick reply editor. What I’m seeing is a weird square in the post (but not in the Editing Post editor)

I’m not trying to be critical of the product. It’s just my observation. You asked why I thought was old stuff and I answered!

I never ever used angular or wanted to. WebComponents always looked like the ideal to me.

At this point, React and NextJS are mature enough. I’m really into Svelte these days.

FWIW, I used to work for Sencha as a framework engineer. I worked on the ExtJS and Sencha Touch frameworks.

Those were basically killed by React.

Edit: Twitter Bootstrap is a framework, with opinions on the components it provides. The major version releases weren’t that compatible with previous versions.

Cheers

@baris excellent. I turned off send validation emails.

Is there a way to enable registration, but to have them end up in something like a moderation queue, where I can review each one and allow or disallow each one individually?

I did try to search for the answer, without luck.

@saikarthikp9 will do

I made a category not visible to non registered users. Anything inside, including subcategories, are not visible to me if I log out.

See permissions for the category.

The issue with many of the buttons is that they are icons that non tech people aren’t very familiar with.

Using CSS to color a button isn’t going to cut it. Many of them don’t even see the blue buttons until I tell them, “look upper right on the page.”

I think ntfy is neat, but users aren’t going to install a client for it.

I think any time a user clicks on a link in an email from the site and gets a 404, it’s a bug, don’t you? It should not send the email in the first place, and even if it must, it should put up a “you are already verified” kind of page, no?

Again, I’m just passing on the problems I’m seeing with trying to get new users using the site. We have hundreds of site visitors and many of them don’t realize the cryptic button on the right side means “register for an account.”

It is what it is. Feedback