This plugin has compatibility issues with Macintosh keyboards.
Normally, "Alt+L" creates the @ character (which we need for pinging users @frissdiegurke), however due to this plugin "Alt+L" inserts a list into the posting, which is nice but definitely not what I want right now (desperately copy-pasting @ from outside nodeBB sucks).

@psychobunny Did you have any time to look into this?

@julian said:

That's not a bad idea... we just don't have plans to split the sites yet.

I understand that you don't want to split up anything, but how about mentioning the OpenSource version at all?
Right now, when I go to nodebb.org, the only chance to see that there is a free version that I can roll out myself is to know what the github logo looks like and then scroll down all the way to the bottom to spot it there (very small, barely visible).
Additionally, if I have AdBlock Plus turned on, these social buttons do not appear at all.

I perfectly understand that you want to earn money and therefore want to focus the page around your hosting service but I think that you could significantly cut the amount of requests from people who heard about a cool OpenSource forum and who now struggle to find a link to download it.

@Nicolas
After a user created a longer posting with multiple spoilers, the forum stopped working properly for me (unresponsive buttons / missing pop-up menus).

I played around with the posting that was made and figured out some problems related to the spoiler plugin.

First, using a list before a spoiler containing a list breaks the spoiler.
Here's the code:

- asd
- asd
- asd

::: 
This is a spoiler containing a list:

- asd
- asd
- asd

::: 

producing the output

• asd
• asd
• asd

This is a spoiler containing a list:

• asd
• asd
• asd

[empty spoiler tag]

This part on its own does not yet break anything but just creates a badly formatted posting.

Second (probably somewhat related), different kinds of lists inside the same spoiler will break the next spoiler following.

Example code:

::: 
- asd
- asd
- asd

1) asd
2) asd
3) asd
::: 

::: 
- asd
- asd
- asd
::: 

results in

[spoiler containing the part between the first spoiler tags]

• asd
• asd
• asd
  [empty spoiler]

Again, this problem alone does not result in a broken nodebb but just in malformatted output.

Finally, I reduced the problem to a situation when both of the above examples are combined.

A posting like this

::: 
1) asd
2) asd
3) asd

- asd
::: 

- asd

:::
1) asd
2) asd
3) asd
::: 

will break nodebb. The problematic thread / posting becomes impossible to delete without deactivating plugins because the moderation tools cannot be displayed.

@psychobunny said:

Ping me again if I haven't looked at this by end of next week

I guess it's time for a ping then ;).

Thanks @julian for pointing out something that seems to be quite obvious, yet I did not try to do that before :).
Honestly, I didn't even know that dragging the composer is possible.
I have absolutely no idea why it got resized automatically in the first place, even across multiple browsers that I tried, but it seems to work now. I'll report back in case the resizing happens again.

Hey guys,
I upgraded to v0.9.1 and thought that everything went fine, quickly wrote an announcment for my users and then went to bed. Today I am confronted with multiple responses to my announcment stating that essential functionality of the forum is broken.

• Pressing the reply button does not open a text field but only shows a small red plus button in the bottom right corner. Clicking this button twice or pressing the reply button again then takes my to the response text field.
• Editing a posting is not possible at all. The red button is shown but no matter how often I click it or the edit menu entry, nothing happens.
• After one response is made, the reply button stops working, too. I have to completely reload the browser to be able to reply again..
• Same holds for chats windows. After any action I made on the page I cannot open chat windows.

I tried ./nodebb reset -p which restored almost all functionality. I am now able to reply and edit as expected with just nodebb-plugin-composer-default activated.
However, when toggling between the half- and the fullsize response field the page will (after a small number of times where it works as expected) only show the fullsize variant. No matter what I try (reloading the page, logging in and out, even restarting the whole forum) I cannot bring the halfsize variant back.

I then tried ./nodebb reset -a which failed with the following error message:

$ ./nodebb reset -a
8/12 16:26 [25051] - info: [database] Checking database indices.

/path/to/nodebb/node_modules/mongodb/lib/utils.js:98
    process.nextTick(function() { throw err; });
                                        ^
Error: Cannot find module './src/widgets'
    at Function.Module._resolveFilename (module.js:338:15)
    at Function.Module._load (module.js:280:25)
    at Module.require (module.js:364:17)
    at require (module.js:380:17)
    at resetWidgets /path/to/nodebb/src/reset.js:107:2)
    at/path/to/nodebb/node_modules/async/lib/async.js:713:13
    at iterate /path/to/nodebb/node_modules/async/lib/async.js:262:13)
    at async.forEachOfSeries.async.eachOfSeries (/path/to/nodebb/node_modules/async/lib/async.js:281:9)
    at _parallel /path/to/nodebb/node_modules/async/lib/async.js:712:9)
    at Object.async.series (/path/to/nodebb/node_modules/async/lib/async.js:734:9)

Can anyone help me to bring my forum back to a working state?
How could I quickly restore the forum to an older version so that I can get it back online for my community?

Edit: By activating all plugins one after another I found that all that reply / edit problems probably come from a custom plugin that we used for text replacement in postings. Which essentially leaves the error message from above as well as the fullsize response window as the only problems I am facing right now.

Do you have a reverse proxy set up so that you can access your nodeBB directly without specifying a port number?
In that case the proxy should handle the certificate stuff as well.

@psychobunny Is there any way to get this working with a recent nodeBB installation?
The plugin installs just fine, however featuring topics via the Thread Tools menu does not do anything.
Thus the widgets stay empty and do not show up (nodeBB log does not show anything).

Imho, together with the custom homepage plugin this would bring nodeBB to be so much more than just a forum. For me this would create the possibility to host an entire community just on nodeBB. No need for a complex blogging or CMS software :>.

I really love the plugin, installed it and it works fine for me!

However, when writing an announcment for my forum that spoilers are now supported I realised that I couldn't show the usage by wrapping the spoiler into a code block.
The spoiler was rendered anyway.

Viewing my user page here in the nodeBB community, I encounter the following problem when clicking on the hamburger button.

As one can see, the menu pops up perfectly fine, but is rendered left of the button, where the visible browser window ends (I moved the full size browser window a bit to the right so that the problem can be seen more clearly).

So far I have seen the problem on this nodeBB instance only, which is partly because my own instance does not show the hamburger button at all at the moment (see this related topic).

@Kowlin I am not that familiar with different shared hosting providers. I am just co-administrating a small webspace for an online gaming community. What does normally prevent hosting nodeBB on such platforms?

Our hoster runs separate MongoDB instances for every user account (on a specific port) and allows to select from a range of free ports to bind externally facing services to. That is everything one needs to provide during the setup phase of nodeBB to make it work (together with a simple .htaccess file for the proxy settings).

@HolyPhoenix said:

I have a hunch that you have shared hosting. NodeBB doesn't run on shared hosting. You need a VPS.

This is not always true. I am running nodeBB just fine on shared hosting (even running two instances in parallel actually).
However, more information is needed to decide whether or not that's a problem.

Well that's of course what I tried. Every possible combination of spoiler tags I could imagine (At the start of text blocks, in every line, in a new line, ...)

While

> citation
more citation
>
> even more citation

renders as expected,

>! Spoiler
more Spoiler
>!
>! even more Spoiler

produces visible exclamation marks in the output at lines three and four.

I just recently upgraded my forum to version 0.9.0 and have the same issue.
Firefox shows no Settings menu, additionally the user name is not only halfway under the profile picture, but also rendered in white so that it is not shown.

When selecting a custom skin the hamburger button appears in the area marked with the top left red circle.
This could at least help as a workaround for users experiencing the problem.

Edit: I realised from the github discussion that this should be fixed in the current persona master.
I'll wait for 0.9.1 then.

Does the plugin still work in a recent nodebb installation?
If yes, do multiline spoilers generally work?
I am getting exclamation marks at the start of a line after an empty line has been used in the spoiler text. It seems that the parsing somehow won't work correctly.

@julian have you ever used copyDatabase with an already existing destination? For me it just fails with

"errmsg": "failed to create collection "nodebb_testing.sessions": collection already exists"

which sounds as if it would expect an empty database or at least one without duplicate collections.
If this won't work I doubt that there is a readymade command to help me achieve my goal.

Hey folks,
I am running a small instance of nodeBB (about 30 users). When testing changes to the site I don't want this instance of nodeBB to be affected directly. Instead, I'd like to create a testing copy.
I already set up nodeBB in a separate folder listening on a different port, made accessible under another subdomain. However, now that it gets to data syncing I am uncertain how to achieve my goal.

I would like to have a recent copy of the productive page, including all user accounts, posts and plugins. When changes are made to the testing environment, these should persist when a new sync is performed (ideally, I would like to copy everything from productive to testing automatically every few minutes or so).

I figured that (since my instance runs on mongoDB) db.copyDatabase() should be the way to go for the user related stuff. As this answer on Stackoverflow states, it should merge the two databases without deleting stuff from testing.

For the nodeBB instance itself, including all plugins I thought that I could probably go with rsync. However, some files must not be synced. This holds at least for config.json and I am not sure whether or not I have to keep in mind other files that should be unique between two instances.

My question basically is if I my approach would work or if I am missing some important points.
Any help in realising my project is much appreciated :).

In case anyone decides to work on that topic: I would really love to see a light version of the Teamspeak widget, that is, without detailed information on clients.
The reason is that I have to deal with a very restrictive rented Teamspeak server where ServerQueries are limited to 10 per 3 seconds (no possibilty to add domains to the whitelist).
Two requests, one for clientlist and one for channellist, would be enough to create a basic viewer layout.
Also, caching the requests so that multiple concurrent page views don't trigger a server flood alert would be great.

I had a look at the widget from @pitaj, but unfortunately my programming skills are rather low.