I hope I don't get accused of super bumping multiple threads tonight (really not so old threads or well not so old last post!)

On first impression, nodeBB was the ticket - without any of the technicals. It's all that matters.

It truly is all that matters. Since the majority of fourm users are not going to be technical and forum have there work cut out to drag people away from the twitters and face books of the world.

A forum can be deployed to any user base so it's application and audience is potentially as wide as you like and varied as you like, that you have to think about simple but not dumb Ui/UX and rely on the beauty of tradition, i.e. established and solid universal conventions that are universal but not afraid to push the envelope to enhance convention to the point it's at least feels innovate if not actually is.

Speed.

It's silky response. The fade out fade in transition was a genius choice, let me type that again GENIUS!

The Composer.

• It looks and is weighed better i.e. it's styled better, simple.
• It's not perfect, but it's one of the best out there.

The composer is the window to all content creation, the crucible of an entire forums everyday lifeforce. It's got to be good, it's got to always be trying to be better, by trying to be great. This is the interface that makes or breaks the user experience and thus a forum.

My UI/UX 2c:

Please consider making the composers upper top line a drag focus draggable area so it is not restricted to the black circle aligned to the left, that should really be centered (it took me too long to figure out) - it breaks a basic UI/UX expectation burned into our retinas at this point!

@julian Cool thanks, yea poor ns-embed is not happy in 1.12.2 - I and others already flagged in that thread, still, A Great plugin!

Ok SMTP/EMAIL is fixed!

Some deeper DNS/MX work seems to have made the difference and using "encrypted" setting - initially I was using StartTLS as per email provider SMTP guide, which specified TLS - tested it again and StartTLS broke it.

Encrypted works.

Yes!

As outlined in the second part to this post here - I have created this dedicated topic for the purposes of pitching this new feature and functionality for composer.

A composer that can align in one click to the right of the screen - creating a split view.

I guess if people want left they can have it but the concept is being able to easily reference posts on the right and compose on the left, keeping an unobstructed view of the entire flow of the topic posts without having to minimize the compose editor.

Meet the new contextual button that would toggle between positions.

Click to toggle horizontal position:
Click to toggle right-aligned position (split view):

As an evolution of composer core feature & function, I believe the case for, is incredibly self evident.

• I'm waiting for someone to tell me this feature is already available...
• I will edit an addition this OP with summary points and extra info if required.

Please Upvote - If you want to see this as a core feature in standard nodeBB deployment.

I've never really seen or understood the true value of a shout box but I'm open to other views - to me it seems to be an ambiguous duplication of forum function and often as an interface element in a forum, it always feels squeezed in.

That's my experience on other platforms.

Obviously, if nodeBB has a shout box it will be the best in the world!

Q: Is it possible for Logged in users to post also posts as guests?

Reason this would be useful is to allow guest posting, that can only be viewed when logged in.

Currently guest post would be wide to the world.

Sometimes existing users and newbies on certain types of forums would like to be able to revert to guest posting where anonymity is important, "asking for a friend..." type questions!

I also have a vague sense this might have already been covered before but I didn't find the exact thread - Please point me in the right direction id this is duplication! Tx!

This is a feature I wouldn't expect in forum software, since traditionally such systems like phpBB don't have it out of the box. It also seems wrong on a base trust level even before we got to the modern era of GDPR etc. etc.

Yet Discourse has this out of the box much to my own surprise and I thought but why would you need it?

Other than tracking abuseive PM's between waring users, which could easily be stopped by the recipient being able to ban PM's form a user. I didn't initially see the valid use case.

The point was made by Atwood, Discourse creator, that for example certain types of nefarious rings might use your PM system to share illicit material undetected. Think the worst kind.

• That is a very valid point and one worth exploring.

However it's still strange being able to read anyones private messages and that users also may simply assume that their messages are private. Few think about databases and that once a person has access to a database they can in theory access any of the info but it's not frictionless access. Discourses implementation is as simple as reading your own PM.

What I felt would be a better solution, more admin friendly and simply effective at addressing the problem , would be to have a system that monitors the PM activity and volume of user accounts.

For e.g. -Perhaps a threshold is set with some other criteria - then imagine a 0 post or very low post count user has more than 2 pm's a day it's reported and flagged in stats. Imagine another users has 100's of PM's per day or hour, it's flagged with more force, because such activity would be highly very suspicious. A whitelist system would handle the good guys and magybenot flag (like mods) but still report their activity too, if required.

So of my 10,000 imaginary forums users how of you find the 4 or 5 who are abusing the system, with little effort but with pinpoint accuracy fast?

Second to that there could also be threshold limits set that users can only read and send x pm's per day until they clock up some rep, which would act as a massive disincentive to abuse the PM system for nefarious and illegal activities. (apologies if such a feature is already there, I'm not 100% familiar yet with all of nodeBB functionality and feature set but getting there).

Open access for admins to PM's does not mean you will easily find and therefore stop the problem. Access only help you determine if it is a problem or not.

You need analytics as an admin in the first instance - therefore it's not an access issue!

I find the Discourse implementation a good example of solving a real but very niche problem but with a wrong solution or at least the wrong 50% of the solution.

I would really like to see a PM report system in nodeBB natively, as a core security feature to tackle this issue.

Warning and notices to users easily administered by default, that PM's are not publicly viewable but admin viewable if x. y and z occurs.

The crazy thing is Discourse team originally implemented this and gave moderators access. That's just insane IMHO, even as an Admin I am not really comfortable with that once click power - it's clearly open to I would say more abuse that what it tries to solve.

@Velocification Well I can't find the exact post now but if I remember correctly @Julian recently indicated a one-click installer was being reviewed right now over at DigitalOcean and it sounds very much like the ball was in their park.

Something I noticed when looking for a nodeBB installer in the DO marketplace, before @Julian revelled this insight, I was using Ctrl/CMD + F for the term "nodeBB" (because there are so many one clicks now) it appears to highlight hidden text in a few places. Weird. I dunno if this is a bug but maybe there is a invisible placeholder waiting to be sprung. I should have looked at the pages source code to see what it was.

I don't know if anyone has any hosted images out there either than might make a difference.

I've done some work playing around with this because it's too chaotic, in fact visually it's bad, very bad but I digress - I found it tricky to achieve but I got it to a point that it was workable, almost to my spec of 3 column, I managed 2 column that appear to be stable enough in an responsive context.

For example:

This is the CSS I used to achieve the above result 2 column layout:

.category-children .pull-left {
    column-width: 15em;
}

I'd like to post the entire custom CSS as I'd like to make it a theme for everyone but I'm not at a theme dev and upload to GitHub level yet, so if anyone would like to help me out, please message me.

I may post entire CSS set sometime, to catch any tips for tidy up - it would be nice to see it reviewed by the pro-pros

I love the composer in nodeBB. However, it's rare to find anything in life that can not be pushed toward greater perfection and since composer is pushing toward perfection already - let's push a little bit more to make the difference!

On community.nodebb.org - I noticed a few extra buttons that seemed to related to the same function or kind of, then I noticed even more - why have 3 image related buttons when you can have one?

Why?

Ok, first lets strip the overlapping icons and rearrange into more logical groups:

Post Edit Tools | Link Tools | Image Tools | Custom Tool | Zen Mode

Space

Super and look at all the new found space, minimal overload is not far off, time to look at the sequential order.

Less is More in the New Order

If there ever was a more graceful flow from left to right in perfect order I have yet to see it, with less buttons in a more logical, sequential and grouped order we are pitching for less visual cognitive load.

Summary:

• Minimal without losing functionality
• Clear left to right flow and back again
• Grouping of icons by contextual function
• Establishes a logical sequence to icon groups
• Creates more space for other icons
• Sets logical order and positioning for future icon inclusion

Naturally it flows that the 3 image button functions need to be folded into a pop-up menu.

Why this is probably a better outcome is that it creates a clear focus and display of the image options to the user using one click, all on a single menu.

Currently there are 3 buttons one of which is visually ambiguous as it presents as cloud up arrow icon, which could be construed as being actionable with any file for upload.

If you wanted to push the logic of this approach further, then even the smilies icon could considered a valid target (hypothetically!) to also fold into the single image button - creating a hybrid single image button, a hybrid pop-up menu with all the visual/image elements in one place.

Please note, I am not proposing it for now but I present it to tease out the natural evolution of where this route might go and is perhaps one reduction too far for broader nodeBB deployments.

Please upvote - If you woudl like to see this in standard nodeBB.

Re: [nodebb-plugin-ns-embed] NS Embed

@The-Worms said in [nodebb-plugin-ns-embed] NS Embed:

commands like git and ./nodebb should not be used with root access (sudo or elevated privileges). It will cause problems with different ownership of files NodeBB needs access to

Ok thank you - I'll create a sudo user and then re-run the installation from scratch.

Ok I tried that but same problem. I used sudo where applicable but was logged in as root, is that ok? I'm not so familiar with privileges in Linux and wasn't thinking about implications of not using sudo.

Therefore I may have missed sudo in previous in re-builds and re-install but this time I was very careful to apply it as outlined as per advice and also the documentation for installing nodebb. I read a little harder.

Right now, I'm starting to wonder if this is a versioning issue - my original but separate nodebb installations (each stack was not exactly the same) had no issues with plugins.

Therefore I've been trying to think what did I do differently other than forgetting to use sudo when I re-installed or rebuilt the stacks.

The only thing I can think of right now is I might have used older versions of maybe redis, but more so and older versions of node.js but I think I always used the latest nodebb (1.11.x)

I might try to re-create the setups dropping back versions of the various components but keeping it at nodeBB 1.11x .

• I decided to fork this topic as I don't want to crowd out useful ns-embed-plugins specific information as my issue is wider as it affects any new plugin installed!

@PitaJ said in [nodebb-plugin-import] Import your forum to NBB:

/admin/plugins/import

Thanks for the reply.

• Permssions error of doom on mkdir... as per previous type errors. It kind of doesn't matter for this install as it's only being used to test the importability of a discourse database.

• Yes I run ./nodebb build after any installs via cmd line.

However I stepped away for a couple of hours from this, read you reply then logged in to ACP and BOOM I can see the IMPORT in plugins menu and ancillary screens!

Good tip /admin/plugins/import by the way! Kind of handy for future reference.

I appreciate your patience, questions and insight always

@PitaJ said in [nodebb-plugin-import] Import your forum to NBB:

Please consider the following

• test using Node 10, not Node 12
• post any errors you encounter while running a build or starting NodeBB
• use ./nodebb dev so you can see the errors in real time.
• either do everything on root, or only use sudo with apt, systemctl, or other linux commands
• install NodeBB to your user's home folder, so you know that permissions will be fine

I ran this as sudo, a bit tricky installing Redis but everything installed as sudo (no need for nginx) but when it came to import plugin, same issue, looking like permissions - so forget that - I redid nodebb install all as root.

Both plugins import & import-discourse are installed and active, and all other plugins are de-activated.

My next question:

Is the import-plugin available somewhere via ACP or is it all command line?

I see screenshots on the git page but see nothing in the Plugins dropdown.

In any dark theme WHITE needs to be handled carefully, HAZMAT Suit and all!

@PitaJ Yea thanks. I had actually done that. Thought I posted same.

I disabled plugins. Works.

Basically This is a temp install to test importing a discourse dB.

I’ll play around more tomorrow. I might rebuild a new stack.

Mmmm... I can't wait for the one-click!

I ran essential build, used nvm and installed nodejs 12.4.0, all done as root user (sudo had issues).

Finally, I can see it listed in the ACP plugin list as installed ... bella Bella!

However I see no sign of it in the plugins drop down list, lets restart & rebuild... and it's all broken. One or more plugins has broken NodeBB and it's not starting, probably permission bitting me in the ass again... ok back to the drawing board.

@PitaJ said in [nodebb-plugin-import] Import your forum to NBB:

Try sudo apt install build-essential

Thanks & Ok DONE! Anything else?

@Bri said in [nodebb-plugin-import] Import your forum to NBB:

cat /etc/os-release

As far as I Can remember, I installed node, nginx as root.

nodeBB was as user in sudo group.

I had issues with permission with embed plugin in other thread but resolved that after guidance I need a non root user to complete the nodeBB part of the install, but I'm open to further guidance as to what is the best course. Maybe I should have not installed nodejs as root, maybe only install nginx as root and do everything else a non-root user.

What about running updates/upgrades?

Host: Digitalocean

NAME="Ubuntu"
VERSION="18.04.2 LTS (Bionic Beaver)"
ID=ubuntu
ID_LIKE=debian
PRETTY_NAME="Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS"
VERSION_ID="18.04"

Thanks. I'll try nvm in future. Good to know. This is new for me.

To see if maybe, a small maybe, there might be a permissions aspect to this problem I ran this plugin as both sudo & root user.

Sudo

gyp ERR! configure error 
gyp ERR! stack Error: EACCES: permission denied, mkdir '/home/node/nodebb/node_modules/iconv/build'
gyp ERR! System Linux 4.15.0-51-generic
gyp ERR! command "/usr/bin/node" "/usr/lib/node_modules/npm/node_modules/node-gyp/bin/node-gyp.js" "rebuild"
gyp ERR! cwd /home/node/nodebb/node_modules/iconv
gyp ERR! node -v v11.15.0
gyp ERR! node-gyp -v v3.8.0
gyp ERR! not ok 
npm WARN textcomplete.contenteditable@0.1.1 requires a peer of textcomplete@^0.14.2 but none is installed. You must install peer dependencies yourself.

npm ERR! code ELIFECYCLE
npm ERR! errno 1
npm ERR! iconv@2.3.4 install: `node-gyp rebuild`
npm ERR! Exit status 1
npm ERR! 
npm ERR! Failed at the iconv@2.3.4 install script.
npm ERR! This is probably not a problem with npm. There is likely additional logging output above.

npm ERR! A complete log of this run can be found in:
npm ERR!     /home/node/.npm/_logs/2019-06-19T16_39_04_031Z-debug.log

Root

gyp ERR! build error 
gyp ERR! stack Error: not found: make
gyp ERR! stack     at getNotFoundError (/usr/lib/node_modules/npm/node_modules/which/which.js:13:12)
gyp ERR! stack     at F (/usr/lib/node_modules/npm/node_modules/which/which.js:68:19)
gyp ERR! stack     at E (/usr/lib/node_modules/npm/node_modules/which/which.js:80:29)
gyp ERR! stack     at /usr/lib/node_modules/npm/node_modules/which/which.js:89:16
gyp ERR! stack     at /usr/lib/node_modules/npm/node_modules/isexe/index.js:42:5
gyp ERR! stack     at /usr/lib/node_modules/npm/node_modules/isexe/mode.js:8:5
gyp ERR! stack     at FSReqCallback.oncomplete (fs.js:158:21)
gyp ERR! System Linux 4.15.0-51-generic
gyp ERR! command "/usr/bin/node" "/usr/lib/node_modules/npm/node_modules/node-gyp/bin/node-gyp.js" "rebuild"
gyp ERR! cwd /root/node_modules/iconv
gyp ERR! node -v v11.15.0
gyp ERR! node-gyp -v v3.8.0
gyp ERR! not ok 
npm WARN enoent ENOENT: no such file or directory, open '/root/package.json'
npm WARN root No description
npm WARN root No repository field.
npm WARN root No README data
npm WARN root No license field.

npm ERR! code ELIFECYCLE
npm ERR! errno 1
npm ERR! iconv@2.3.4 install: `node-gyp rebuild`
npm ERR! Exit status 1
npm ERR! 
npm ERR! Failed at the iconv@2.3.4 install script.
npm ERR! This is probably not a problem with npm. There is likely additional logging output above.

npm ERR! A complete log of this run can be found in:
npm ERR!     /root/.npm/_logs/2019-06-19T16_39_59_807Z-debug.log

node11

I've done some work playing around with this because it's too chaotic, in fact visually it's bad, very bad but I digress - I found it tricky to achieve but I got it to a point that it was workable, almost to my spec of 3 column, I managed 2 column that appear to be stable enough in an responsive context.

For example:

This is the CSS I used to achieve the above result 2 column layout:

.category-children .pull-left {
    column-width: 15em;
}

I'd like to post the entire custom CSS as I'd like to make it a theme for everyone but I'm not at a theme dev and upload to GitHub level yet, so if anyone would like to help me out, please message me.

I may post entire CSS set sometime, to catch any tips for tidy up - it would be nice to see it reviewed by the pro-pros

@Velocification Well I can't find the exact post now but if I remember correctly @Julian recently indicated a one-click installer was being reviewed right now over at DigitalOcean and it sounds very much like the ball was in their park.

Something I noticed when looking for a nodeBB installer in the DO marketplace, before @Julian revelled this insight, I was using Ctrl/CMD + F for the term "nodeBB" (because there are so many one clicks now) it appears to highlight hidden text in a few places. Weird. I dunno if this is a bug but maybe there is a invisible placeholder waiting to be sprung. I should have looked at the pages source code to see what it was.

I don't know if anyone has any hosted images out there either than might make a difference.