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.

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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!

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@caesar Yep that's it in a nutshell, nailed it, when it hits the "it just works" moment, this affords intuitive mass adoption

Getting to that point is filled with blood sweat and tears.

We have the same issue on a non NodeBB site, that was ported from phpBB like you, exactly the same vie topic link issues, but with very similar stats to what @julain posted, 80K redirect not indexed / not started and about 30K canonical not indexed / not started - over all I think approx 130K+ unindexed or not started.

I also concur with @julain - new content does appear to get indexed very quickly and if it's SEO friendly + is hot topic at that time, traffic magic happens.

@NodeHam said in Google constantly complains about nodebb forums:

We used to spend a great deal of time on SEO but found it was a never ending game with Google and could not justify spending so much time at it.

I concur also with @gotwf and @phenomlab that SEO has overtones of snake oil or it always feels like you're shooting in the dark very much like you have outlined here. I think you know the answer.

Worry about it less, do nothing to please google, keep an eye on it, and see if patterns form.

I was about to create this very topic, so let me please bump this 2018 muse into 2023.

This would be useful.

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.

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

Updated a nodeBB to 1.13, all seems relatively fine, though, I was not paying attention and I updated to v1.13.4-3. - that's ok for now, seems to work.

However the ns-embd plugin is not embedding tweets, just leaving a blank blockquote. Youtube videos embed perfectly fine, so I suspect the watch + replace needs tweaking?

Watch

(?:<a.*?)?(?:https?:\/\/)?(?:twitter\.com)\/([^\/\"\s]*)\/status\/([^\/\"\s]*)(\/photo\/\d|)(?:.*?\/a>)?

Replace

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><a href="https://twitter.com/$1/status/$2?ref_src=twsrc^tfw"></a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

@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.

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 all user accounts.

For e.g. - A threshold is set with some 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 user has 100's of PM's per day or hour, it's flagged with more force, because such activity would be highly suspicious. A whitelist system would handle the good guys and magybe not flag (like mods) but still report their activity too, if required.

So of my 10,000 imaginary forum users how do 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 helps you determine if it is a problem on a PM per PM basis, how do you even know which user acc PM's to start looking at - it is still needle in a haystack.

What you need are PM 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 niche problem but with the wrong solution applied or at least the 50% wrong.

I would really like to see a PM report/abalytic system in nodeBB natively, as a core security feature to tackle this issue - that can auto lock crazy PM behaviour.

Warning + 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.

Congrats if I'm reading it right on the new arrival! It's the best thing.

@frankm

Ok great that worked, installed via CLI.

Totally forgot about it @crazycells mentioned it ages ago but it was no longer visible searching for plugin via the find-plugins in ACP.

How is this plugin long term as it seem to be archived, does this indicate no future dev, maybe it can be forked and someone can keep it alive if other plugins do not reach a solution.

This one ain't too bad either, you can create palettes and is very hands on too

+you can apply various type of colour blindness filters to the palette to simulate how it might be perceived.

https://coolors.co/b8d8ba-d9dbbc-fcddbc-ef959d-69585f

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?

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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.

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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

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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.

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

@gotwf All the nails hit.

This is an incredibly spot on analysis IMHO. It has articulated perfectly the changing trends with cause and effect in focus, which concurs with my own real world examples as an admin over almost two decades.

Might we take a moment and coronate this deleterious phenomenon as the linkedin effect.

It is chilling genuine open and robust exchange and increases self censorship leavening a lot of crap unchallenged that normally would last pissing time as they say. It reduces fine posters curating well considered and researched output.

The net result is traffic suffers, forums suffer. Communities empty out. It’s a race to zero. Thus we all suffer.

The ability of agreeing to differ without descending into all out War (typically instigated from one side) must not be lost!

Otherwise self moderation is mistaken for keeping ones trap shut when it matters most.

@julian @baris From minor over the shoulder watching of this activitypub implementation.

It does looks like NodeBB is going to need an expandable stat-badge-total for shares/like etc. form a UIUX point of view mid posts, surely thing will become massively untenable if you have screens of "shares" on a busy spot.

I'm sure you've got that on a long finger to-do down the line list

What about using user acc privileges to block guests & spiders?

This is a feature in Discourse, and when i first saw it years ago I thought, COOL!

Many years later, when actually interacting with the feature in Discourse. I realised it was generally a bad system because it was really a bad idea.

What problem was it actually solving?

Users not being able to moderator other users comments????

That is Chaos!

Why invite Chaos?

The problem you see it as is lack of staff to police the conversation. This is a problem for all busy forums. Overall auto features are too crude to deal with rising noise IMHO.

One very obvious downside of "social justice" which these days is IMHO another term or mask for mob rule, users quickly learn the weakness of the system, and actively suppress other users in a targeted fashion, so what might seem to solve the moderation burden, could end up being weaponised against ordinary users and cause serious community problems, the kind you may not recover from, as recriminations and all kinds of things could explode form a few bad turns.

The most important thing for a user first off, is to be able to report or flag a post easily, that see as problematic for whatever reason and then for that to appear quickly and very visibly to mods and admins alike.

At least a Troll is very easy to see, users who are abusing a system like this, how visible are they? You need to back up the user accounting side too. This is starting to seem like a headache.

Traditional moderation with a good team is the solution, that is sustained and enabled by a great admin/backend that make moderation of problem users fast and efficient. The better this system is the less moderation users you might need to assist in day to day moderation.

Get that right and you are winning.

Naturally moderation teams have there problem and this is often due to progress of time in my experience, so to add a crude feature like
mob down voting that kills post, does nothing to address team work and good admin policy, vision and direction.

A good report/flag system with SPAM and some other options where a user report may temporarily hide a post, is a good start - SPAM might be hidden automatically, (yes that could be abused) but since it is granular more likely it will be used in good faith most of the time (but I have seen people go absolutely nuts with report features too which is just silly), options for off-topic or disruptive might good (it might be goo to allow an admin set extra report flags and also control the action after the report, doe sit hide the post or not. Things like that, which aids the internal operation more than handing over executive powers to the mob!

Setting a downvote threshold to remove a post is basically giving your users based an achievable target to counter disruptive use or exact revenge! Trolls might also use this feature to counter also and then you have all out war.

Leave all the power in the hands of Admins, Mods and give them good control to track, control and censure problematic posts and users, that is hight visible quickly, fast and able to batch operate in comfort and then users will understand that the odd troll might get through or a bit of spam may appear but since you do such a great job of keeping the house clean, they really appreciate your efforts.

No point in making yourself obsolete now is there?

My experience with security cams cheap as chips from china and maybe even the higher end too, is you can not trust them on your valuable network.

For CCTV I'd say yea, make it CCTV, on its's own network that does not connect to the outside world if possible, or that you cna unplug when not updating firmware etc. etc.

I picked up some years ago, what looked like a good cam at a good price (I think it was fosscam brand) and purchased a whole bunch, maybe about 8 in total.

Tested the first one on the network, when suddenly the entire VOIP system was notable wobbly, checking it seemed to have lost about 80% of it's bandwidth when I looked at the router admin page to see what the load was like, and what do you know, this single security cam hogged most of the router resources and was pinging out all over the place, a lot of addresses in the Asia region, like for example and weirdly what seemed like some Thailand nightclub if I remember correctly and other places.

I did a search and found out lots of other users had similar experiences with different models form this brand! Doh! I don't think firmware mods exited for this camera and I never thought of that tbh.

I can't imagine what would have happened had I placed all 8 on the network - Sent them all back.

Security cameras and cam system are notoriously weak security point and are used to run mass bot attacks.

Caveat emptor

@crazycells

Hmmm my thoughts are go with what is native and supported that works.

As a general caveat - What happens when the plugin breaks and/or is becomes no longer maintained?

It can happen.

To abide by my own call to keep things simple.

I would suggest to base such a feature on report/flag action. rather than the downvote.

Downvotes are visble to users.

Reports/flags are not as a rule - this should be the trigger.

This goes some way to addressing the weakness of user mob behaviour to game the vote system to knock people out.

My first coaxial broadband was 0.5 Mbps, that was a real improvement over dial up hands down.

A few years later and a differing location, connection available offered a base that gave real world 6Mbps but ADSL, and around that mark web surfing really did feel instant and responsive, that's about 10 years ago.

Since then browsers have gotten more bloated, OS's too and the average web page layered with all kinds of elements, the rise of streaming and gaming add in the need for VPN's these days, is it actually overkill for basic web, yes it is and that's why I don't really need 1Gbps.

Meanwhile, I got a generic mailer for 1Gbps offer today for 50 euro bucks a month (switch over offer), other offers range around 60-70 eurobucks a month, 500 Mbps, around 30-45 eurobucks, all on fibre.