@ron_jeremy said:

As for the hosting, if you're hellbent on hosting it yourself, you're going to want to at least proxy the node.js stuff via Apache or nginx or some other reverse proxy webserver, but that still won't stop it from being easily DoS'ed .....

Here is your red flag. Everyone who doesn't know web development and design in the real world focuses on being DoS attacked. Why? Because it is the cool, scary word that they heard on TV. Wake up to the real world, only a handful of massive websites or really aggravating groups get DoS'd in the real world. This isn't a threat for normal people and normal websites. This is a completely naive thing to be concerned about for a forum of this nature. I run the tech site of the busiest NodeBB forum that we know of (tens of thousands of posts per thread, millions of views on a single thread, nearly a thousand daily posts, over 10K views an hour) and these concerns are quite simply, silly.

This is what a little kid trying to talk about IT sounds like. In the real world, being DoS attacked is not something that happens every day. That takes time and energy and requires someone with a goal. And if you want to protect against it, which I've needed to do, the platform that you run on isn't where that tooling is going to be.

I'd stop talking to this guy.

@kinderjaje said:

@a_5mith "we charge $95 USD per hour" that is a quote from Julian, so freelancer i look cant cost that bro. With due respect for everyone works on nodebb and their own values, but for me that is sick price.

That's actually crazy low and I would recommend to the NodeBB guys that they reconsider working for anything so low. They are a unique resource and can do custom work at a rate and efficiency that no one else can touch. No one. I totally understand that you can't afford them, that's not cheap to a home user. But this is Node.js development we are talking about. At $95/hour these guys are literally doing work as a favor.

I work for a consulting firm and if you wanted us to look at this we'd be 50%-100% higher and we don't have the kinds of Node.js and certainly not the NodeBB skills that they have. That's just basic market price. Anyone capable of doing this work is going to be very expensive. Even if you live in a low cost area, Node.js skills are universal so people doing that work there can get paid to work in NYC, London or Toronto remotely or relocated to where the work is.

You can find cheaper people out there, sure. But you can't find better ROI or TCO, I guarantee it.

A little tooting of our own horn, but today is the fifth anniversary of the MangoLassi IT Pro Community which started in 2014 running on NodeBB since day one. Still growing after five years and a great partnership with NodeBB that has done so much to make it all possible for us.

@herruu said in Which is better NodeBB or Discourse?:

At several moments, we also looked at both Discourse and NodeBB but you both lack a simple install procedure for a shared hosting provider (in my case vimexx.be). In fact, there's no way to install your application there at all! And it's a real pity that it's not the case because NodeBB is a very good forum platform.

You have to understand that the reason you had an issue is because you chose a PHP host, not a NodeJS host. There is zero issue running on shared hosting and no documentation needed to do so. The issue is that you specifically tested with a host that is only focused on different platforms than what this one runs on. Vimexx is not a generic "host any app" system, it's very specifically a PHP host only. Nothing wrong with that, that's very common for basic web applications (specifically WordPress), but no hosting like that is generic and even many PHP apps cannot be hosted there (I know, I run a PHP host like them and there's no way around those limitations.)

If you used NodeJS shared hosting, you'd have no issues. Same would happen if you tried to install a Java, .NET, Windows, Python, Perl or other application there. Your shared hosting has to be chosen based on matching the application environment of the software that you want to run.

Much of what you like about these advanced platforms comes from their use of NodeJS over PHP. So this isn't some background noise or weird choice, it's literally the core of the issue.

Is this the longest one? We have been waiting to hit the landmark 10K posts. And we just did it minutes ago. Not a very meaningful thread, but epic in length and views (but not the most viewed every, second as far as we know.)

10,000 posts in a single thread

Feel free to pop in and contribute? ML is a technical community so perfect place for NodeBB admins to hang out too! And a great place to push the performance limits of NodeBB.

Up to date on all of ours and working well.

@kenygamer said in Run two nodebb ionsame server:

@pichalite said in Run two nodebb ionsame server:

@kenygamer you don't know how to run 2 installs of NodeBB on the same server and you are offering installation and support for others for a fee?

Stop scamming people.

Ssshhhh, I'm not hosting two NodeBB's on the same server, that's stupid
I offer a VPS for every installation, i dont host two on the same

Stupid? That's very, very smart. Why would you split up the applications?

@kenygamer said in Run two nodebb ionsame server:

@AOKP Because i dont (yet) have money to afford a big vps

So.... what does that mean for your customers? It only takes a $5 VPS to have many NodeBB instances. Is it that your customers total revenue is under $5? I'm confused. You would have to be spending way too much money to have one VPS per instance, yet you say your are too poor. Those two things don't go together.

MangoLassi is still going strong, after 4.5 years on NodeBB; and they just announced their third annual conference for May. And they just hit a new volume of monthly traffic...

Just saying hey, as we've not been on here a lot for a while, as things have been running so smoothly.

We are nearing our fifth anniversary on NodeBB and we still constantly get compliments that the site is so screaming fast and responsive and makes interacting a pleasure. It's been a great journey so far and we just keep growing.

@herruu said in Which is better NodeBB or Discourse?:

@scottalanmiller said in Which is better NodeBB or Discourse?:

ys.

Thank you all for the great support you are giving My currenct hosting contract runs until june next year so this gives me some time to get acquainted with NodeBB.

I'm now looking into writing some simple plugins but I'm starting from scratch so still some learning to be done. But this is off-topic I think

Anyways, I have discovered that NodeBB is indeed very fast. So that is certainly a plus to choose it.
And your support is top notch too, I get answers when I ask a question.

Perhaps a few 'to be improved' would be to have a decent plugin database (even though I can search for them from inside the ACP) and some more themes.

It's a very helpful community. Everyone's here to help out. Welcome to NodeBB! It's been great for the ~8 years that we've been on it here!

I agree, a dozen or so pre-made and officially maintained themes would be stellar.

@gotwf said in Which is better NodeBB or Discourse?:

You go Mr. Miller!

So long away, and then, poof! A deluge of cuttin' to the chase wisdom. Salute!

How's Nicaragua, eh? A little bird told me you were groovin' on it.

Thanks, good to be "back", been such a busy summer with the move. Life is great in Nicaragua! When are you visiting?

@herruu if during your project you get the feeling that things are hard or not working as simply as they should, just post on here or on MangoLassi. Loads of Linux / Mongo / NodeJS / NodeBB expertise and people will jump in to help you. Getting up and running should take you no more than 30 minutes. Even if you run into problems, someone will get you sorted super fast.

Transferring your old data might be painful. Might be easy. It depends on that plugin. We were lucky that we started from scratch and never had to bring data in from somewhere else. That's the part that will cause some time delays.

@herruu said in Which is better NodeBB or Discourse?:

For now I'm just testing it on a desktop at home but I'm liking it a lot so changing providers is not impossible (my current contract ends somewhere beginning of next year).

You can get into Vultr to host it for around $6/mo. So unless you are ultra poor, you probably don't need to be spending a lot. Your forum sounds pretty busy, so that might not be enough.

I run MangoLassi and we can bounce off around 200,000,000 views a month and we run off of Vultr High Frequency 4GB plan at $24 USD / mo and the site is screaming fast even under the heaviest load. So while $24 is not nothing and I totally get why no one wants to waste money, it's also not an amount that you generally worry about contracts to avoid. You should not spend more than $24/mo, you won't see any benefits. You could easily spend less.

We also use CloudFlare to aid in performance. We are a global site and need the caching. Been in production on NodeBB since March, 2014 when it was still an alpha release.

@pitaj said in Which is better NodeBB or Discourse?:

Nodebb-plugin-import can help

What formats does it support?

@herruu said in Which is better NodeBB or Discourse?:

so to use it in production, I'll need to move to a different provider.

Yes, but avoid shared hosting unless it is a dedicated NodeBB provider. This is not WordPress and you'll be handling a lot more traffic, a lot faster and more dynamically. You need control of your database, of your NodeJS versions, and so forth. Shared will be too costly and without any benefit. Literally, no benefit.

Building a CentOS or similar (Alma, Rocky) Linux system on someone like Vultr, Linode, or DigitalOcean will give you non-shared power and flexibility for likely LESS money than shared hosting. Shared hosting is rarely a good idea. It's good for really low power, low need websites which is why it is often done free for that market. Once you are hosting a production system, you'll want more power and that doesn't mean more money or effort.

@herruu said in Which is better NodeBB or Discourse?:

I'm looking into how I can copy the databases from woltlab (php) to nodebb. Bit of a winter project when the weather is bad

You can't. Not realistically. So the issue is that whatever WoltLab is using, and I'll just guess that it is MySQL / MariaDB is going to be relational data and MongoDB is document data. They are two wholly different types of data storage.

So copying, no, it can't be done. It's fundamentally impossible.

That said, to do this you'd need to learn the database format of the old system, and the database format of the new system, and write your own conversion software that reads the relational data and transforms it into documents and inserts into MongoDB. It "can" be done, but it's all custom coding and quite a bit of work to know both systems under the hood so well.

This is a lot of the power of NodeBB, using a screaming fast ultra-modern document database back end. But moving data from a relational system will be painful.

@herruu said in Which is better NodeBB or Discourse?:

As said, the installation process is very complicated

Here are install instructions that demonstrate how crazy simple an install is, even on a dedicated server. Would be far easier on shared.

Jul 23, 2020  /  IT Discussion

Deploying NodeBB 1.14 on CentOS 8 with MongoDB 4.2

NodeBB is a powerful, open source package for building online communities and forums. We usually recommend running it on CentOS 8, primarily because of the need for MongoDB deployment support. The current NodeBB release is 1.14. By default, NodeBB uses th...

And most of the instructions there aren't about NodeBB, they are about doing basic server updates, installing the operating platform, acquiring and installing the database server, etc.

Only a couple lines of all of that is getting and installing NodeBB. For just NodeBB on shared, you can easily install with a single command. It literally can't be made easier. I've deployed a lot of these, we do one command installs regularly.

@herruu said in Which is better NodeBB or Discourse?:

As said, the installation process is very complicated and even impossible on shared hosting. News flash : a lot of us forum owners are on a shared hosting

It's not really complicated and 100% works on shared hosting. I've run it on shared hosting for years. It's no different than if you were trying to install a MacOS application on your Linux desktop... it's not compatible. The fault isn't that of the operating system, nor of the application, but having chosen the wrong operating system for the application that you want to run.

The right shared host has zero issue installing nodeBB (or Discourse.)

@herruu said in Which is better NodeBB or Discourse?:

At several moments, we also looked at both Discourse and NodeBB but you both lack a simple install procedure for a shared hosting provider (in my case vimexx.be). In fact, there's no way to install your application there at all! And it's a real pity that it's not the case because NodeBB is a very good forum platform.

You have to understand that the reason you had an issue is because you chose a PHP host, not a NodeJS host. There is zero issue running on shared hosting and no documentation needed to do so. The issue is that you specifically tested with a host that is only focused on different platforms than what this one runs on. Vimexx is not a generic "host any app" system, it's very specifically a PHP host only. Nothing wrong with that, that's very common for basic web applications (specifically WordPress), but no hosting like that is generic and even many PHP apps cannot be hosted there (I know, I run a PHP host like them and there's no way around those limitations.)

If you used NodeJS shared hosting, you'd have no issues. Same would happen if you tried to install a Java, .NET, Windows, Python, Perl or other application there. Your shared hosting has to be chosen based on matching the application environment of the software that you want to run.

Much of what you like about these advanced platforms comes from their use of NodeJS over PHP. So this isn't some background noise or weird choice, it's literally the core of the issue.