For our NodeBB installation, I have made a Github issue importer (Github issues → NodeBB). However, I don't have the time to maintain it and it's not perfect code (although all NodeJS and relatively clean, I think).

Is there anyone who wants to take over and maintain it?

Hello,

I suggest to (may be as an option?) replace CDN (at the first glance, there's bootstrapcdn.com and cdnjs.cloudflare.com) and Google dependencies (fonts.googleapis.com in the CSS) by local files because

1. I don't think it's good practice to spread our visitors' data (maybe including referrer etc.) all over the world for privacy reasons (for instance, Google Fonts are a free visitor counter for Google, and I don't want Google to track [probably with Google cookie, i.e. bound to a specific user] which users visit our site),
2. it would make us independent of these services. If a CDN chooses to take down the .js because it doesn't meet their requirements or for whatever reason, all NodeBB instances will be unusable,
3. site loading may even be faster because there are no additional DNS lookups and some gzipped JS and font files should be transferred quickly by any server.

It would be a really good feeling to get back control over the whole forum and not having to trust CDNs and Google.

Thanks for your awesome work!

Please don't use Chrome to workaround this.

It's just that html.composing body.page-topic.page-topic-13568.page-topic-dark-theme.page-topic-category-10.page-topic-category-nodebb-themes.page-status-200.skin-paper div.composer.resizable.reply div.composer-container div.row.write-preview-container div.write-container textarea.write doesn't have background: white, as you can see in the excellent Firefox DOM inspector. In the NodeBB stylesheet, textarea has color: inherit, but no background: inherit. So the browser stylesheet for textarea's 'background' is used, which is the theme background by default, which is dark in this case.

Some digging shows that these values come from normalize.css 3.0.2. Seems like this is the same problem as this one: https://github.com/necolas/normalize.css/issues/469

This has been fixed in normalize.css in Jan 2016 by removing color: inherit. In the case of a dark background (coming from the Gtk theme), the text should now be white (or whatever the Gtk theme says) instead of dark, which makes the text readable.

Suggested fix: use a version of normalize.css later than Jan 2016

PS: Maybe Chrome is just not able to show the dark Gtk theme? Could be an enhancement request

@Jacob-Moen said:

CDNs will make the site load faster - that's what they're for - so that users around the world does not have to go all the way to your server to fetch resources, but can fetch them closer to their location.

Thanks, I know what CDNs are used for And I want our users to fetch our resources, and not the resources of Google (or Akamai, or Amazon, or whoever else), and get tracked at the same time.

Hi,

I have some questions about full-text search and how it's intended to work with NodeBB.

Default search: I have had NodeBB running with the default search plugin (db-search-plugin), but search results were of very bad quality. I really tried to use it, but I can't tell users to "use the forum search" to find the answer for a question, because it just doesn't work. It shows a huge bunch of unrelated postings etc.

Solr: So I decided to set up a Solr instance and install "the" Solr plugin. However, it was not easy to find a working Solr plugin. There were several ones, some basically working, some not. Also, the only working Solr plugin reported that the Solr collection works; re-indexing and searching were also working (with high-quality search results :)). However, new postings were not indexed, although the option is on. So, using Solr is also very cumbersome and not really useable currently.

Redirecting to a search engine: On the public forum, I have just disabled forum search and used a search bar which redirects to a search engine (with site:forum.domain appended). However, I'd like to start a private forum, too (with sensitive information), and that's not an option there.

Your opinion: importance of search? My personal opinion is that good full-text search is a very importang thing for a forum. Whats your opinion on that? Isn't it one of the most important features of a forum? Most people recommend to use the forum search before asking the same question again and again. In my opinion, good full-text search makes the difference between a volatile social network discussion and a knowledge database.

Suggestions: I know that good full-text search is a very complex topic and can't be done as a "side project". So I wonder whether the default NodeBB installation could be improved by providing

• a working and officially supported Solr plugin for those who need self-hosted search (for instance because the forum is private), and
• a working and officially supported "redirect to $search-engine" plugin (when the forum is public and the human/computing resources for self-hosting Solr are not available)

instead of activating the db-search-plugin by default.

What to do? Can you suggest what I can do to get good full-text search working on a private forum? Shall I use the Solr plugin? Which one? Is there an officially supported plugin that's actually being maintained? I'd have to dig into the problem that new postings are not indexed automatically first.

What search plugins do hosted NodeBB installations use?

PS: Thanks for providing NodeBB as free and open-source software! I really love it and I'd also be motivated to contribute to NodeBB in this matter. I just don't know where to start, so I decided to start it by asking and discussing

Ok,. I have just thought every gcc48 version would crash for you. – So everything is OK

Really love NodeBB & FreeBSD

What would be really cool (and it's not available yet, as far as I understand): if there was a privilege for tagging posts. I use tagging for purposes like marking a topic as solved or as assigned to a specific component. This should not be allowed for normal users, but only for admins.

At the moment, I just remove all tags set by users (most people don't set a tag anyway) and set them manually. But it would be great if there was a setting for that

@artesea Currently, the Apache Solr plugin is working here very well. It requires a Solr server, which quite large and runs in a VM here, but it's really worth it.

Problem identified and fixed: it was the direct transport, which is not a good choice (should be sendmail or smtp instead). See https://github.com/NodeBB/NodeBB/issues/4034#issuecomment-170894390

Got it working https://github.com/rfc2822/nodebb-plugin-sso-gitlab

1. Create a Gitlab application with scopes openid and read_user.
2. Set the application ID/secret in config.json: "oauth": { "id": "yyyyooouuurrr iiiidddd", "secret": "sssseeeccrreeetttt" }
3. Install & activate the gitlab-sso-gitlab plugin (I used npm link).

@PitaJ Done: https://github.com/NodeBB/NodeBB/issues/5127

@Pappmann https://github.com/NodeBB/NodeBB/blob/v0.9.x/src/emailer.js

For a quick hack, just change the second 'direct' to 'sendmail' in line 17.

For a real patch, change the name in the array, too (rename the first direct to sendmail), and then change it in line 118, too.

Hello,

When I just wanted to update 1.10.1 to 1.10.2 with the same procedure as always, it failed and NodeBB told me that I should manually install libvips (FreeBSD). So I tried to build libvips, but it wanted to install ~ 100 packages for an X server, which I don't want to have on my server. Is it really required to have X server code now just to install the dependencies for NodeBB and has this requirement been introduced in 1.10.2? Is there a reason for that?

Can I help making this dependency optional?