I just switched to Nodebb from SMF (~400 forum users) out of curiosity and because I liked the funny round category symbols. And because SMF was buggy and isn't really developed anymore with passion.

The installation, setup and customization of Nodebb took me about 72 work hours and 6-7 complete reinstalls.

Why? Because Nodebb is really buggy out of the box compared to most other forum softwares.

Just installing plugins and doing some normal random stuff hosed the database couple of times and I got locked out from my admin account 3-4 times, I was unable to login with any account including administrator accounts in maintenance mode and had to learn some crazy Redit database voodoo skills to remedy the situation.

If you have a problem that is not a regular problem that 90% of the people have - the support is basically nonexistant and you are on your own.

Importing from SMF hosed the database couple of times. BBcode -> Markdown conversion and html conversions don't work really. No, really they don't. And yes I read the manuals a few times and tried different approaches.

The plugins are mostly broken, like at least 65% of the plugins that I tried just don't work.

The developers have an idealistic vision about modular BB system where you can do next to ANYTHING with plugins. You don't like the composer? Swap it out. You don't like Marked? Swap it out!

In theory this is really cool. In reality? In reality we have developers making - really nice - plugins for their own needs and then publishing those. It's all great. But then the need goes away and 40% of the plugins become abandoned and stop working or don't work as intended when Nodebb get's updated. The plugins lag behind. Some critical systems have support from the developers, other's become abandoned mostly.

What does this mean? It means that if I want to use Nodebb for my projects and if I want some features that are not there out of the box (and the box is pretty light because of the design philosophy, modularity, expandability and all) then I have to Do It Myself, code it myself.

The shoutbox, for one simple example - it's a very popular feature out there. Well, guess what? It's not available in the core. But it is available as a plugin! But.. the plugin doesn't work by a simple press of a button, now does it? Why not? Because it's broken. So you have to become a developer and get under the hood and fix the problem yourself because, you know, people have lives and the plugin authors have other things to do besides always updating his or her plugins.

What if you aren't so lucky that you actually can do all this stuff like I can with ~30 years of experience in IT? Well, then you're out of luck. Maybe you can wait for a couple of months - or a year - to see if someone has managed to fix the problem? But perhaps you just wish to open up a forum for your users or friends, like.. now? Instead of waiting. Then maybe Nodebb is not for you.

In theory the philosophy of keeping the core light and having modularity and letting the users do the extra features that are a part of other forums software by default - it is a really good idea. I like it myself.

But in practice it doesn't work very well because the weakest link there is the people, always the people.

I have Nodebb up and running now and I really like it. Yes - it has shortcomings, yes - most of the plugins are useless, yes the composer is utter crap (you really should be able to compose in the "preview mode" by default and the other way around too if you're inclined to do so - instead of this one way street. What is this, the 80'ies? Get your **** together) but overall I love Nodebb and see a lot of potential there.

One or two more weeks of tweaking here and there and I think and adding a couple of features and my installation of Nodebb will be just fine.

Oh yes, about the composer? What ever happened to this proposal?

(The last message in this thread)

Any reason why the dual composer view was chosen over WYSIWYG?

I understand that the main discussion here is UX based and centred around the dual composer but the subject of markup was brought up so I thought I'd share t...

NodeBB Community (community.nodebb.org)

What the man suggests - I checked out the demo - it's just so awesome. It's just what the composer needs.

Make it happen. Please?

Thanks for reading my praise of the Nodebb

I would like to see a few new options in the admin control panel:

1. Deny users from changing their name
2. Require admin approval in name changing
3. Allow users to change their name X times per Y time period
4. Always allow users to change their name

Yeah, that was it. Solved it myself. Only took like 6 hours. I hate Apache configuration so much ...

Here is the final solution for others in similar predicament:

How to remove ":4567" from your address properly with Apache + mod_rewrite

.htaccess:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} ^some.example.com/index.html
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://some.example.com:4567/ [NC,P,L]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^some.example.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://some.example.com:4567/$1 [NC,P,L]

Just replace the bolded addresses with your own domain, add into your root level .htaccess file and turn RewriteEngine on.

Explanation of what happens here:

The first line matches your address and if it contains some.example.com/ or some.example.com/index.html it replaces it with (on the seconds line) with some.example.com:4567

(without these two lines you will get errors when you try to display the main page because Apache adds "index.html" by default to the request which gets then handled by Nodebb because of the two lines below these first two - but there is no index.html to handle because of the way Nodebb is built)

NC = ignore case
P = proxy, so that it is invisible to the user (they don't see the :4567)
L = last rule, we stop if match is found

Third line matches only your host without the trailing /somepage.html or /images/someimage.png or what ever. And the last line replaces that with some.example.com:4567/ and adds the rest of the address with $1

This is rather useful if you are already running other websites besides the Nodebb forums with Apache on the same server. Because if you use the instructions in the documentation for ProxyPass you will get all of your web traffic rerouted with that configuration (unless you are running Nodebb from a subfolder, I think?)

Well, I hope this is of some use.

And remember to edit your config.json:

"url": "http://some.example.com",
"port": "4567",

If you find errors in any of this please post here.

I noticed that tags in the thread list don't use the colors assigned to them.

Is this a feature, a bug or a problem in my custom CSS?

Tag colors inside posts show up OK.

I'm using the default theme and running the latest 0.7.3. version of Nodebb.

When a new user registers on the forums - it needs a bit stream lining in my opinion.

1. When admin approval is enabled and users fills the forum and presses "send" they should be taken to a page with a message "you will receive an email when your registration has been approved" instead of leaving all the info in the fields - it gives you the impression that "Oh, I pressed this button but why is all this still here? Did something go wrong" and gives the user chance the keep pressing the button again and again. It's confusing.

2. Add possibility to show user a message with instructions before registration - on the registration page / or even better: the ability to better customize more pages from the widgets instead of just "extend -> widgets -> global and groups/details.tpl. For example I would like to instruct the users what kind of names to use in the forums.

3. More/customizable fields in the registration form.

4. Require numbers in passwords, [x] Require LARGE letters in passwords, [x] Deny user from using his name or email as password, [x] Deny these common passwords -> customizable list.

5. Also password strength meter that is shown to the user at the registration form would be nice in my opinion.

6. Hello reader! Please add your own suggestions/support below. Let's try to get Nodebb's developer's attention together

Thank you! That was it. Issue resolved.

After upgrading to 0.8.0 I noticed that some of the settings had reset.

I tried to change them back from the admin panel, for example:

Settings -> User ->
Require email confirmation, Allow account deletion, Make user info private, Convert user image uploads to png

When I try to change these settings and press save and then refresh the page or switch to another page and then back the changed I made have reverted. The buttons show their default positions.

I think he wants to have group chat added to the private messaging, ie. so that you could invite other people to join in on the private conversation you are having with someone else and make it a group/conference chat -> they could see the chat history you've already had in that conversation and join in on the discussion and drop out as they see fit.

Shoutbox with groups wouldn't quite fill this hole because it could be important that the private message history is saved and I don't see the shoutbox doing that securely, it's not it's original function. Shoutbox is a shoutbox - it's meant for a few shouts and random comments, it's not meant to be the complete chat implementation.

But I think having a well done group conversation added to private messaging would require a complete rewrite of the existing private messaging implementation.

I also agree that it needs to be done eventually to get Nodebb up to the bar, but it's probably a lot of work and not a fast patch job.

@a_5mith said:

1. I thought this happened, when you submit the form, it takes you to the home page, logged in, but unable to post until your account has been verified...

With the default settings yes. But if you have "Registration type: Admin approval" enabled then you get this strange behaviour.

How to improve Nodebb - a few ideas

I've been using Nodebb now for a couple of days and here are some things from the top of my head that have poked me my eye that need improvement:

Thread tools: Merge thread

We are already able to split thread. The admin should also be able to
merge threads into other threads.

Thread tools: Move post improvements

The admin should be able to move single posts into other threads with graphical interface. Popup menu where you choose category and the post you wish to move the message into.

Thread tools: Edit poster/adopt post

The admin should be able to switch the owner of the post. (right now I have orphan posts left over from import and the only way to change their owner is to use the redis-cli). Probably not a very popular/useful feature in general, but should be simple enough to implement because why not?

Example scenario to show there is actual need for this:
Let's say for example that user X leave the forums and has been running a long time thread where he has been updating the first post for relevant information and user Y wants to take over for him. He asks the admin "could you make me the owner of this thread?" And the admin is like "ok, dude, I'll just click here: EDIT OWNER" And the user is like, "Thanks, admin, you're the best! You can do ANYTHING!"

Threads/Themes: There is a need for "new posts in thread" icon

The "new posts" section is not enough. You should be able to see at a glance the threads that have new posts also from the sections.

Visual Example:

Widgets: show logged in people

Show all people who are logged in right now.

Visual Example:

New Config option: sounds

Enable/disable notification sounds for new users by default

Thread list/Themes:

Show original poster of the thread also by name.

Visual Example:

Delete users: Admin should have option to delete users without deleting their concent.

Users name would stay in the posts but there would be indication that the user has been deleted. Users profile image could be replaced - or not - with image that indicates that the user has been deleted. Or the image could be grayed.

Revamp the default composer

Default composer should be able to edit in WYSIWYG mode as well as in source mode.

See this here (last post):
https://community.nodebb.org/topic/1942/any-reason-why-the-dual-composer-view-was-chosen-over-wysiwyg/22

And here a working example for visual reference of what I mean:
ckeditor.com/demo#bbcode

(Can be made to support markdown)

More message selection options

It would be nice to be able to select/deselect all posts and to do "invert selection".

User maintenance: add filters

Admin control panel > manage > users should have filters. For example: show only users who's email hasn't been verified, show users with verified email, show users who have been inactive for over a <time period>. Also it would be nice if you could see with a glance the status of the user, perhaps from the edit menu -> flags, banned, locked out, admin.

Nodebb's ban features are politely put - from the stone age.

Please put some work on this after you get all the more important stuff done.

I get a **** load of trolls and other non-wanted elements on my forums and at the very least I should be able to IP-ban people without resorting to my firewall. Better user tracking, better ban features.

Thank you.