@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.

@nmeadows said in All links under Admin->Manage don't work:

@gotwf I have found the culprit, and it has nothing to do with NodeBB, so I'm sorry to have bothered you.
It ended up being our security team turned on web filtering rule on our load balancer that filters out certain URL paths that have admin/manage/etc in the path. The idea being to filter our administration pages and force the use of VPN to get to those paths. It's a fine idea, but I was not informed of that change.

Thank you for your help.

Better to bother us and get it fixed than to not bring it up and not Glad that you got it figured out.

@gotwf said in All links under Admin->Manage don't work:

@nmeadows Indubitably. I am retired old dinosaur. Did some devops in my day a'la Salt and Chef but that predated Kubernetes so I've no clue. But at least now you have pinpointed the link in the chain that is failing and where to focus future troubleshooting efforts. Good job.

Salt? Get off my lawn, whippersnapper.

@gotwf said in Some questions :

@scottalanmiller Moreover, many forums are used as knowledge bases, tech support, etc. and hence do not tolerate "social media gossip", striving instead to diligently cultivate a very high signal to noise ratio to save end users/customers from having to sift thru a buttload of drivel.

So, while Scuttlebutt, the protocol, at least upon cursory glance, piques my interest on the geek front, I also do not see how it would replace current backend db's.

Yeah, it's an interesting idea. I don't want to say anything negative about it. It just doesn't feel applicable to this realm. Might be awesome for the Facebook style realm.

@cregox said in moderated? your post is queued for approval.:

perhaps i got just a bit lost in the way for this last iteration on the past week or so... i certainly got triggered. was it enough to justify my "soft ban"?

Keep in mind, it was two soft bans. The first you discussed with the mods and the limit for soft bans was raised, which I agree with it was way too long. There needs to be some leniency for someone, like yourself, who is posting infrequently and the first few posts or threads end up less than ideal. Hence the lower number now.

But you definitely had a warning, whether warranted or not. But you continued down the path, and remain arguing some very key points that keep getting negative votes (like doubling down on free meaning what you want and claiming something free isn't). That's fine, you can do that. But you risk negative votes and feedback because people don't appreciate false statements, especially when they aren't like accidentally false or like "white lies" like "you don't look fat in that dress" but rather statements to disparage the community where someone is giving something away and you want more or to lash out or whatever so keep saying that free isn't enough, you need "more free" or you want stop making false claims - it's literally a form of minor extortion (threatening to lie about a product if they don't give you more.)

So in a situation like this, where the initial feedback isn't enough and doesn't change the course, how would you propose the system work? Clearly there has to be a way to discourage that kind of posting, there needs to be a warning system, there needs to be a way to alert other readers that they need to watch out because there is a negative reputation here. Those are givens that I think you have to agree are necessary in any public setting or the forum becomes useless because you have no way to tell when someone has value (e.g. check Spiceworks where they used "activity" rather than "feedback" so someone like me gets an insanely high rating regardless of the quality of my feedback). We know that "pure up votes" encourages politicization as being inflammatory has no downsides.

So while you feel that you are being moderated quickly and automatically, there are a few key points to make. One is that you are not banned, you are "slowed down" with a human verifying what you are saying. Two is that there were warnings and changes made to accommodate you, something no one has ever needed before in six years or more of the forums. Three, even after the warnings and new limits, you kept going. Four, you didn't offset any of this with positive posting that wasn't trying to reinforce your one seemingly consistent promotion of "something else." And five, it's only temporary as long as you don't post positively which, in theory, takes extremely little time.

Given those five points, doesn't it seem that the soft ban, while it kind of sucks for you personally, is exactly how you'd want the system to behave?

@cregox said in moderated? your post is queued for approval.:

funny enough, i think you were the only one to even give me any positive votes, even if out of pity.

Negative feedback is only valuable when positive feedback is given, too. I'm not a supporter of "negative votes", I'm a supporter of "votes". Both are valuable, either on its own becomes only a popularity contest.

@cregox said in moderated? your post is queued for approval.:

if 2 members get triggered and enter in a loop, like it just happened with me (it was always 2 down votes), then i'm suddenly and quickly "banned".

Only if NO ONE up votes. So it's working correctly. Post only negative things and what exactly would you want the system to do? You have thousands and thousands of readers on here, none of them are upvoting your posts. None. And upvotes happen like over 100:1 compared to downvotes for normal posting. So to end up in this situation takes some effort.

You like to say "echo chamber" as a response to "I don't like that people don't appreciate what I'm saying." To you, any feedback or criticism is an echo chamber. I think you misunderstand these mechanisms.

@gotwf said in moderated? your post is queued for approval.:

@PitaJ said in moderated? your post is queued for approval.:

@cregox your reputation is low because community members are downvoting your posts in other threads.

So the post queue is being activated. And the new user limiter.

There is no notification for when people downvote your posts. If you'd like that to change you can open an issue on GitHub

Not keen on this idea as it may well result in unintended consequences, e.g. "down vote wars".

Initially I wanted to know such details and wondered why such had been cloaked. I figured the devs must have had a good reason for it, as since we have upvote notifications I doubted it was an oversight. So I rolled with it. Experienced the NodeBB experience fer' a bit. Now I see the wisdom in maintaining some anonymity for down voters. It is rare I down vote but when I do I do so honestly as an effort to cue the poster that they may want to give further pause/analysis of their utterances. Alas, there are some petty people out there. Also trolls just looking to game the up/down vote system. No need to make it any more easier and/or amusing for them to escalate disagreements all out of proportion, mole hills becoming mountains, etc. Thus, I think anonymity for down votes is a good thing.

We had a bit of debate about that on ML and ML decided to go with non-anonymous down votes, but it was a bit of discussion and generally I'm more for anonymous votes. When you make down votes listed, it creates a massive barrier to meaningful feedback and empowers bad posting. You no longer use downvotes to "discourage" behaviour, but start to use them to "flag for moderation." Which is a very big difference.

It's important to see a general volume of voting. Is someone "generally good" but an individual post bad? Downvote wars typically require a lot of effort that is easy to catch by mods. But someone posting badly, consistently and lacking appreciated positive posts to offset them, are easily identified.

On ML, for example, with the huge traffic that we have and heated debates, the number of people who've gone negative (that aren't bots) is like three, in well over half a decade. Pretty much any valuable posting creates enough up votes that a few bad posts or threads have no real effect.

SSB is really focused on "social" like Facebook. Which is very different than forum software, IMHO. SSB in that space I can see making a lot of sense, potentially. But for a forum, I'm not seeing any value.

Now, that doesn't mean that a forum "face" to SSB wouldn't be useful or the way to go. But fundamentally this feels more like window dressing. The core functionality of how forums work vs. gossip pages is a bit different. Not entirely, of course.

But for example, forums are essentially public places where all posts matter and discussions must be centralized to make sense. The responses to a post are generally the value, not the post itself. In a social platform like Facebook it is the opposite, the post matters and not the responses (mostly), and you select who you want to see and who you don't.

The underlying datastore could be similar. But the basic functionality is different. So SSB is designed around that, around posting personal things for a select group to see. Rather than designed around posting public things for everyone to debate.

@cregox said in Some questions :

try merging it with scuttlebutt for a true change! now THAT would be awesome!! most of what nodebb is is an interface, the ux. and that's also what scuttlebutt lacks the most.

So you are thinking that a NodeBB based, or NodeBB style interface for Secure Scuttlebutt would be useful? That makes sense. Would be nice. I guess the question becomes, "What is the value of SSB as the backend?" As opposed to centralized databases like we have today. Feels like it would add a lot of complexity and I'm sure that there is some value in there in a real world use case, I'm just not sure where it would be, outside of maybe some really complex or fringe cases.

So I'm going to go back and read the use of it to figure out what the context was. But a quick look at Secure Scuttlebutt / SSB... it's a peer to peer gossip protocol meant for distributed, unreliable posting. Seems like a fine technology with digital signing. But I'm unclear where it would really play a role in the forum world.