@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.

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.

@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.

Up to date on all of ours and working well.

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.

@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.

From a performance perspective, NodeBB is mind blowing. Everyone coming to our forum is always commenting on how screaming fast it is.

@gotwf said in Is there free hosting?:

@scottalanmiller Except as you point out... DMCA abuse and.. coupled w/rather draconian TOS verbiage... makes me skeer'd to go with them. I wonder what DO's terms w.r.t. forums are? Somebody should research that.

DMCA abuse happens with any hosting in the US, and the Sega situation was on AWS I believe. TOS is meaningless here as what they "require" is already guaranteed under US law. So if you host in the US, that TOS is just informing you of the law, not draconian whatsoever. They are actually better, in that they are being honest and up front and not making you discover US law on your own.

@dunlix said in Is there free hosting?:

@gotwf I don’t really care about vultr, I’ve never really used it. I didn’t read their tos and whatnot because I was just reading this I googled how to set up nodebb forum and that came up

We have one of the busiest NodeBB platforms, hitting 191m hits a month, and we just moved to Vultr from Linode. I doubt AWS will hold a candle to it, AWS costs a premium for their extra features but I think for NodeBB hosting the raw power and simplicity of Vultr will prove a better platform and more cost effective. Vultr is absolutely what I'd recommend if you are going to host NodeBB with any real scale.

@antosik said in NodeBB + MongoDB + Scaling (k8s):

@PitaJ
I'm not against it ^^.
Just want to research a bit before giving AWS more money. :d

@baris
So, we need to try:

• implement something like src\database\redis\pubsub.js in mongo;
• check out socket.io-adapter-mongo and @nodebb/mubsub packages?

UPD. Found an interesting thing - maybe we can use watch + changeStream to implement the pubsub ?

What's your overall goal? I have a feeling that you are giving AWS way more money than you should already. If the goal is to go big without wasting money, this isn't the approach. Unless you are doing something in the billion hits a month range, I don't think that this approach can be cost effective at all.

So if you want to give AWS money just for fun, then you might as well give more. If you want to be cost effective, then setting yourself up for scaling will require more scale than will ever be practically needed.

@הערשלה said in Is there free hosting?:

I must!!!
Is there such a thing ???

Free hosting will never really happen. I mean obviously some person who wants to donate hosting "could" do so, but it makes no financial sense. Hosting a site like a forum takes a lot of resources and no business is going to want to give away those expensive resources just to give you free hosting.

Of course, under the right conditions, someone will give you the hosting, but they will do so because they are getting something in return. It might not be direct money, but something. It costs money for a site to be hosted. If you aren't the one paying for it, someone else is on your behalf.

@gotwf said in Is there free hosting?:

Because there are also other asshats that would abuse DMCA - if only because they can.

Sega of America did that last week to the SteamDB guys. Files a completely false DMCA request and then refused to respond when SteamDB told them that their request wasn't valid. Sega provided no proof or evidence, and just threatened all of the hosts until SteamDB was extorted to take down information on Sega's distribution numbers under a claim that they were distributing software. Total constitutional violation and clearly stepping into RICO violation territory, but the DMCA makes you pretty much immune to any prosecution.

I know that this has been for forever since this was posted. But this can still happen.

You can check your current EMFILE limit with "uname -n". Typically this will be set to 1024.

You can raise this temporarily to something much higher like this...

uname -e 20480

That will typically fix things.

@waugh said in Hooking Up to Mail:

@julian Do you engage in a more intimate relationship with Haraka?

Niche third party platforms would be far less likely. Postfix is built into nearly all production platforms and configured out of the box for most usages (standard SMTP relay.) His point was that they don't get their hands dirty with any specific email implementation and leave that for the admins, they just send email out on whatever protocol or API is selected and the rest is up to the email admin to configure.

@julian said in Hooking Up to Mail:

@waugh @gotwf

Okay, guys, this ? This is why we try to have an arm's length relationship with sendmail.

Seems like managing sendmail/postfix can be an entire undergraduate course SENDMAIL101

It is. Plus no one uses actual Sendmail and hasn't in forever. Postfix started wiping it out twenty years ago when every major platform moved away. Since then, Sendmail has become all but forgotten. Even mentioning it is a little weird as almost on one will ever have it, but everyone has Postfix as its the default in every non-Windows platform in production today. Sendmail was hella complex, Postfix is normally ready to go by default for most purposes. But it depends on how it gets installed, what OS you run, etc.

For most Ubuntu, CentOS or Fedora users you just install it and it works immediately. But then dealing with mail transport in general can be a mess.

@waugh said in Hooking Up to Mail:

@pitaj said in Hooking Up to Mail:

NodeBB supports using sendmail on Linux to send emails. To do this you just turn off the SMTP transport and make sure no email plugins are enabled.

In my case, I'm fine now, because I found a way to configure Postfix that results in its relaying the outgoing mail. NodeBB is talking SMTP in the submissive aspect of SMTP, and Postfix can understand that aspect if configured to. And I think that's a fine and future-oriented way to work. However, if anyone searching for information comes across this thread, it will not tell them how to get NodeBB to use "sendmail", either when the "sendmail" executable is that of the Sendmail package, or when it is the backward-compatible shim included in the Postfix package. Even though @PitaJ says that an admin of a NodeBB instance can configure it to turn off SMTP transport, I never found a mix of settings of NodeBB that would do that. With every mix I tried, it continued to try to open the submission port. And again, for me, that's fine.

My thanks to everyone who responded.

Sendmail is like MySQL, it's become an API. Postfix is "a sendmail" and MariaDB is "a MySQL." People tend to call anything that looks like the app to be the app, but Postfix and MariaDB are used far more than the applications that they mimic.

I don't believe that there is one. I think that you'd need to write your own to have this functionality.