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NodeBB: Node.js-based forum software

285 points by vecio 12y ago

yannis 12y ago
Is there a demo somewhere?
- dhawalhs 12y ago
  https://community.nodebb.org/ https://community.nodebb.org/
  - q_no 12y ago
    Oh dear, this look like the pinterest of forums. I find this layout very confusing. Dunno if I'm too for this but.... Back in my days, a forum hat a clearly structured (table)layout which gave a perfect overview in a matter of seconds. Pepperidgefarm remembers! ;)
- hackerboos 12y ago
  They really need a demo link in the header.
n0rm 12y ago
Bad design. Throws the information at the user and expects attention.
- franze 12y ago
  harsh words but true. "modern web" should not be synonymous with "ugly tile design" "annoying fade in / fade out whole page animations" "onscroll something happens stuff"
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
dewey 12y ago
Very interesting project, but I have to say I'm not a big fan of the fade-in/fade-out animations while navigating the forum. It'll get annoying very fast. The forum home page is a bit cluttered imo, especially with all the latest post quotes. And obviously the javascript hijacking the scrolling behaviour on the landing page is something which I always find quite annoying, but it seems to be en vogue at the moment. I hope this doesn't sound too negative, just a few things I noticed while browsing the demo.
- arghbleargh 12y ago
  Yes, I found the latest post quotes to be rather distracting. There is no context for the posts (not even thread name), so it's all wasted space for me. Maybe it would be more useful to show something like recently commented threads and maybe a preview of latest posts in that thread if you hover. Some other issues for me: * The usernames do not appear next to the avatars in the posts, and generally users are identified by avatar rather than username. This is very confusing, especially since avatars can change, and it's hard to distinguish faces in images that small. * Along the same lines, icons are used all over the place instead of text. I find this annoying, as the icons are not self-explanatory, and I have to hover over every little icon in order to understand what I can do. For example, I had no idea what the "topics" and "posts" icons meant before hovering. Similarly, there is no reason to use text in the navigation bar (add an icon next to the text if you must). To be fair, the icons have the advantage of taking up less space on mobile. * The styling was a bit jarring to me, with the high contrast and lack of strong borders between elements. The whole purpose of going to a forum is to read a lot of text, so it makes sense to use more neutral background colors. Of course, this can be customized I'm sure, so this is more feedback on the demo site rather than the platform. But overall the implementation seemed solid, and I can see this eventually becoming a nice BB platform. Edit: this is all based on https://community.nodebb.org/ https://community.nodebb.org/.
  - Scuzz 12y ago
    We use NodeBB at http://bitbangers.co.uk/ http://bitbangers.co.uk/ but with a different theme. You should take a look and see how different it is. http://convoe.com/ http://convoe.com/ also uses NodeBB with a completely different theme.
pibefision 12y ago
UI seems very complex
- higherpurpose 12y ago
  Yeah, column based UI seems pretty overwhelming at first sight.
chrislomax 12y ago
I think I was expecting it to be a normal forum layout but faster. I must admit, it didn't feel faster. The fade feels like a cop out on speed and acting as a mask. Also when going onto the forum, I was clicking links but nothing was happening? Then I would click the home button and the last button I had clicked would then activate, like it was a click behind? The home layout reminds me of hootsuite, I find the layout too cluttered. I'd imagine you would get used to it and you would know where to look eventually but I must admit it wasn't very intuitive. The plus points are that I do think the world needs an overhaul on forum software, it's tired and hasn't changed much in 15 years. I don't think this has been done in vain. The feature set looks good I just don't think you need the fading transitions and so much information all over the place. It needs simplifying; in my opinion.
- Fuxy 12y ago
  That's weird seems to be responsive enough for me it's not extremely faster then anything else however it's not slow either. Compared to some forums the would be a very big improvement in loading speed. As far as the layout is concerned it's not intuitive i haven't seen anything similar so it takes a little getting used to however that doesn't mean it's bad. Edit: I guess it's getting slightly slower now with the HN effect however I only noticed it going back to the home page.
mrmondo 12y ago
Lack of UX & no ACID compliance so I wouldn't use it for anything in production.
- aikah 12y ago
  what do you mean no ACID compliance ? the db used? And can you be more specific about what's wrong with the UX?
  - mrmondo 12y ago
    Correct, regardless of what redis tries to sell itself as it is not a database I would trust my data with long term. As far as UX goes the demo site was incredibly hard to use, it doesn't lead your eyes trough a path of workflow, not to mention that narrow vertical columns are a highly inefficient way to digest data.
    - cwyers 12y ago
      Is an online forum an application where you have to worry about trusting your database? If you lose a forum post now and then, it's not a good thing, certainly, but depending on the forum, it could be an acceptable tradeoff.
      - Argorak 12y ago
        Considering that a forum is also not the most high-traffic kind of application, I do not see the reason why you should use a high-performance K/V-store (with all the tradeoffs coming with it).
- eurleif 12y ago
  Redis is fully durable if you use append-only files with the "appendfsync always" option set. http://oldblog.antirez.com/post/redis-persistence-demystified.html http://oldblog.antirez.com/post/redis-persistence-demystifie...
  - 12y ago
hhandoko 12y ago
Have they recently moved to a different pricing model? The homepage says free, but the pricing page states $35 - $100/month. I would guess they mean self-host is free, and the prices refers to hosted / managed instances. In which case, they should make this point much clearer.
- joeyspn 12y ago
  Correct. That's how they intend to make money, but self-hosted is free..
collyw 12y ago
Does "modern web" mean it has to be Node based? Unless you are expecting a hell of a lot of traffic, I wouldn't have thought a BB was a particularly suitable use case for node (correct me if I am wrong).
- kenster07 12y ago
  Node would be useful for the chat feature that one can see in the screenshots.
  - Rapzid 12y ago
    Because they are using node and they were needing to implement a chat feature?
- euank 12y ago
  "modern web" doesn't have to be node based, but just about any web app is a suitable use case for node. The exceptions are web-apps that require heavy backend computation (javascript/node sucks at that), but even then you could use node + a work queue that's handled by a more appropriate language. Nodejs has arguably the best websocket implementation of any language and has mature drivers for pretty much every database backend. It has various templating frameworks etc. A BB just needs a database at the backend and a way to get that data out to a browser. In that regard, nodejs is more suited than many other languages. I don't really get your comment since it seems to imply that writing it in nodejs comes at some cost and you need to justify that cost by saying you expect a lot of traffic. I've seen this attitude before when someone writes something in assembly.. "Oh, you're hand-optimizing your program's assembly? Unless you really need that performance I wouldn't think it's worth it to use assembly". The thing is, nodejs doesn't have all that many problems. Sure, there's the massive number of warts of javascript, but people have learned to write readable and less-buggy code in the javascript ecosystem at this point (promises, jslint, etc). So to repeat my answer to your question: no it doesn't have to be nodejs to be "modern web", but I do think nodejs is appropriate for this use case.
  - collyw 12y ago
bolaft 12y ago
The threads themselves are pretty good looking but the forum main page (https://community.nodebb.org/ https://community.nodebb.org/) is really cluttered and confusing. Also, why are there upvote/downvote buttons on thread messages? Do they have any effect on visibility or are they just for show?
- Scuzz 12y ago
  Their main forum home page is a theme called Lavender which is quite busy. There are other themes available that are less cluttered and busy, Vanilla and Cerulean are a lot nicer in my opinion.
retejo 12y ago
I have used this before, in just my first week I had multiple crashes. DO NOT USE THIS FOR PRODUCTION YET.
- BuckRogers 12y ago
  Judging from the looks of it, I won't be using it in production ever.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
hpaavola 12y ago
Some obsevervations while using https://community.nodebb.org/ https://community.nodebb.org/ Kinetic scrolling on Firefox for Android is broken. Do not fiddle with scrolling when doing web development, ever. I guarantee that you will fail. Front page forgets the scroll position when coming back with back button (Firefox, Windows 7). When you do AJAX stuff (or websockets or anything else not plain HTTP GET that browsers do when you click normal link), always show progress indicator right after you user clicks something. Now when the site is slow (because of HN effect?) user is shown blank page while the page is changing. All I can see is the top bar and the grey background after clicking any link. It takes 2-3 seconds before anything visible shows up. During this time always show some progress indicator. Going back and forth quickly occasionally gives user a wrong page. For example right now my URL bar shows https://community.nodebb.org/topic/7/nodebb-plugins https://community.nodebb.org/topic/7/nodebb-plugins but content is a post by quahfamili posted 12 months ago with title Testing. Bulletin board system gains nothing from "single page application" style architecture, it is a collection of documents, stick with it. EDIT: Also, when using infinite scroll, do not put anything in the page footer. Now when the pages have copyright info and couple links in there, I can see those only for a split of a second before new content appears. Makes me go crazy.
- briantakita 12y ago
  > Bulletin board system gains nothing from "single page application" style architecture, it is a collection of documents, stick with it. Saying Nothing is to be gained is going a bit far. This is an interesting experiment, with some novelty, that will be iterated upon. I presume that the bugs will also be fixed.
  - hpaavola 12y ago
    Yes, I was a bit too harsh. My point is that discussion forum is almost completly just a collection of documents. Traditional web pages serve that structure really well.
    - andybak 12y ago
      I agree although I can see value in a pjax style approach to get faster page reloads. As long as you preserve normal behaviour and url structure, this is usually a win-win. EDIT - just checked and it does a moderately good job without javascript: "Your browser does not seem to support JavaScript. As a result, your viewing experience will be diminished, and you have been placed in read-only mode." This is probably an acceptable compromise. Just to clarify - I'm not arguing that everything should work with js disabled - just that it's a good litmus test for whether a website is fairly robust with regard to normal HTTP behaviour.
davidjgraph 12y ago
My issue is with the top level design used (aside from the fact we seemed to have pushed it over). The root, https://community.nodebb.org/ https://community.nodebb.org/, is a Pininterest/Google+/other tiling Each of these forums is ultra-old-school BB threaded style conversations. It's a very weird mix of old and new ideas that doesn't work for me. The reason I don't like these threaded conversations is once they go beyond a certain length, the only people who read or post to them are those that participated in the start of thread. It's just a way of having a public conversation. For anyone coming in later they need the question and the final answer - SO. This isn't really news, there's a reason StackOverflow works, it's brutal quality filtering. I think a lot of people would still love to see a decent OS SO clone. OSQA is just dead. http://www.question2answer.org/ http://www.question2answer.org/ is the only active one I'm aware of.
- scrollaway 12y ago
  I'm surprising myself: I actually like it! It's refreshing to see people trying new ideas. And when I thought about the main page further, I kinda realized that a table-listing of forums is not great. Best of wishes to this project. You left a lasting impression in barely a few seconds. I'm impressed.
- Mahn 12y ago
  Not everything on the internet is of a Question-Answer form. There are cases when a SO style forum doesn't cut it, think for example online games/MMORPGs. That being said, I'm not digging that tiled design on the main page either. I think a list view would work fine, not need to reinvent the wheel there as long as the underlying technology is modern and robust.
- lfuller 12y ago
  Many forums are exactly that - a public conversation. Not everyone who makes a post on a forum is looking for an answer per se.
- octagonal 12y ago
  I think the Pinteresque tiling home page might work if the information density were to be increased by quite a lot. What bothers me most is how you can only see the name of the board and the two/three most recent comments. What does that provide in terms of information? Not much IMO. The forum itself just seems like the same 90's forum from yesteryear with a new glossy coating. Once you've gotten used to the Reddit/HN way to manage content you simply can't go back to that.
leorocky 12y ago
This reminds me of Atwood's Discourse. I don't know if there's anything broken with old forums. They don't have the whizbang features, but it's nice to not load a gimmicky JavaScript UI that adds no value to what is essentially a way to post and read messages.
- hrrsn 12y ago
  A lot of these new style forums confuse the hell out of me. I miss the good days of Invision Power Board. Discourse is the only one I've liked so far.
vertex-four 12y ago
Is there really any reason to use Javascript as a layout engine for what is really a traditional forum that we've been doing in HTML/CSS since the dawn of the web? Frankly, it feels slow and clunky to load, as each component loads individually and re-positions everything else. Page switching feels horribly slow as well. This is a case of single-page-appification of something that really isn't an app at heart, but is simply a content-centric website.
- krapp 12y ago
  The only reason I can think of - and admittedly I can't prove it but it seems intuitive - would be the assumption that pushing rendering to the browser and breaking requests up into fine-grained AJAX requests or doing resorting in the browser, takes some burden off the server. Why should you have to reload an entire page, for instance, when a thread only contains one new comment? Browsers aren't dumb terminals so let them do some of the work. Of course this is assuming the javascript isn't also piling on a bunch of nifty effects as well. For me, though, it seems to load really quickly.
  - vertex-four 12y ago
    You can solve that with React.JS rendering on the server, then again on the client once the page has been downloaded. That makes the page render quickly, then it acts as a single-page app once loaded, without appearing to be jerky and presenting either a loading screen or a half-loaded page which takes multiple seconds to load fully. Twitter do this for their web interface (although not via React).
edwinyzh 12y ago
I did registered, maybe it's just me, but real don't like it's UX... So I did a little more search and found this: https://github.com/cnodejs/nodeclub/ https://github.com/cnodejs/nodeclub/ the UI looks much simpler and neat, but I haven't dig into any of them further though...
kmfrk 12y ago
While I'm not sold on the software, I'm glad to see more competition in the field of forum CMSes. :)
cs02rm0 12y ago
I think the general level of criticism seems a bit harsh. It's perfectly usable even under the weight of at least HN, quite a lot of effort has clearly gone into it. There's some edges that want polishing, particularly around page transitions but I don't see much from a quick look or any of the comments that couldn't be resolved in short order. Most of the issues are where they've been a little keen to apply effects. I'm not sure I'll ever warm to javascript on the server for my own needs, but good luck to them I say.
Scuzz 12y ago
This forum software is quite new and they are only on the 0.4.x version. It is still under heavy development with lots of changes and fixes being implemented all the time. I use this NodeBB for one of my forums and I have no issues with it. The only complaints I have had was to do with a plugin and not the actual NodeBB software. Their main theme at the moment is called Lavender and I do find it cluttered and a bit busy but there are other themes available to use. They do tend to change the theme with each major release so when 0.5.0 comes out soon there may be another theme for you to check out. The plugin and widget system they have is very useful with new plugins being developed all the time. The infinite scroll can be turned off. I have had a few issues with upgrades but that was down to me a slight version error on their upgrade script.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
bobcostas55 12y ago
Ah, the "modern web". Where hipsters have to take something that was perfectly fine and ruin it by re-implementing it badly in the latest fad language. Love it!
- thegeomaster 12y ago
  I feel ya. And Javascript is ugly, I personally would never use it if I didn't absolutely have to. What's more, Node.js code tends to look horrible with all the callback indentation and spaghetti. An async server's programming environment and style could have been done way more gracefully.
- thathonkey 12y ago
  Javascript isn't really a fad. Server-side JS isn't going to be a fad either, hate to break it to you.
  - romanovcode 12y ago
    Just like RoR wasn't a fad? It's practically gone nowadays because most RoR devs switched to NodeJs.
    - thathonkey 12y ago
      JavaScript has quite a few advantages compared to RoR (eg. it will forever be the language in browser, hence if you choose Node then you are using the same language on both sides. This is the main reason I think it won't be a fad like Ruby. Also Node is way faster than RoR on average). So no, nothing like that.
capex 12y ago
Kinetic scrolling doesn't let me go through your site how I'd like to. It zips past, in one flick I am at the footer.
guiomie 12y ago
Since this is a link to a github repo, I checked the source code. I personally using tabs as opposed to 2 or 3 spaces makes the code ugly. Can someone help me undertand "require('./user/auth')(User); " ?? from https://github.com/NodeBB/NodeBB/blob/master/src/user.js https://github.com/NodeBB/NodeBB/blob/master/src/user.js
- runj__ 12y ago
  It initializes the Auth module with the User object. The Auth module in turn extends the User object with the property 'auth'. The auth property is then extended with a 'logAttempt' function and a 'clearLoginAttempts' function. The User object in the parent context can then use these properties. Oh, and I agree that the tabbing makes it look ridiculous. Javascript should use two spaces, nothing more, nothing less (let the fight begin).
  - b3n 12y ago
    > Oh, and I agree that the tabbing makes it look ridiculous. Javascript should use two spaces, nothing more, nothing less (let the fight begin). That's not the code's fault, GitHub should set the tab-size[1] property to something more legible. [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-text/#tab-size http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-text/#tab-size
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- Q_the_Novice 12y ago
  Also found the coding style a bit complicated and confusing - looks like they are passing the User module to other modules(in this case the auth module) and adding methods.
  - guiomie 12y ago
    Yah, the module is actually an exported function. Makes sense, but a bit confusing.
- 12y ago
jstsch 12y ago
I went comparing forum software the other day, last time I did was 10 years ago. Wanted to get a nice and simple forum up 'n running in a couple of hours. PhpBB is still the top hit when searching. But come on, we can do better than that? So tried Discourse, but the Docker-only installation turned me off (a magic black box). After getting it to run for a bit, apparently something crashed and got a gateway timeout. No Docker experience, so couldn't easily get in and get some log data. Hard to debug. After killing the container and restarted it worked again... not wanting to learn docker for setting up a simple forum (trying to avoid the rabbit hole). And how am I gonna update this box? Then a look at NodeBB. Too immature, a little bit funky UI and also relatively hard to deploy. Don't have NodeJS running on one of our production servers. Ended up with VanillaForums: untar... welcome screen... db credentials... go! Much cleaner than PhpBB and simple to setup. Styling was a breeze too. A couple of hours later I had a forum matching our identity up 'n running. Don't want setup and maintenance hell for something as simple as a forum...
- krapp 12y ago
  Unfortunately, it doesn't seem there's a lot of work being put into a new generation of PHP forums. VanillaForums looks interesting though.
  - babuskov 12y ago
    About a year ago a friend and I tried to build a social network for some niche and forums were one of the functions. It is pure LAMP code, written in Yii framework. Since the project failed, I'm trying to get all the rights to publish the code under GPL. My plan is to also run a small social site for programmers as a proof of concept and having a real-world website where the code works. Of course, there are some things specific to our project which I need to remove/refactor first, but it is not too much work. If anyone is interested in beta-testing when I release the first public version on github, please drop me an e-mail and I'll let you know when it's ready (my e-mail is in my profile).
    - krapp 12y ago
      Out of curiosity, why Yii?
Xspirits 12y ago
The prices are totally abusive ! https://nodebb.org/pricing https://nodebb.org/pricing $75 monthly for MAX 2,500 users, seriously ?
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- TimWolla 12y ago
  You are aware that this is the hosted solution? You can get NodeBB at GitHub if you want it to host yourself.
cabalamat 12y ago
At the moment this uses the same notation ("...") both to show and to hide quoted text. A simple improvement would be to use different text for these inverse operations (perhaps + and -, or >> and <<).
psychobunny 12y ago
Thanks for the feedback and all. Wish we'd get on this page a few months from now because we're still in heavy development. Bugs and all that - our community/demo is pretty much running a nightly build ;) Just wanted to say, the "pinterest" homepage is just a theme. We've got an extensible API and an easy (hopefully) theming engine. Just to show you how different it can look like, open up http://convoe.com http://convoe.com, give it a shot on your mobile as well - it's awesome. There are some themes out there that have a basic traditional view as well. I'd like to say we're really working on the engine a lot, and once everything is stable we'll blow full steam ahead on cool themes, some traditional, some "modern" (whatever you like to think of that as). We also have almost 100 plugins in such a short amount of time, which hopefully shows how extensible our forum is. We also have a widget system - you can drag and drop widgets on the home/sidebar/header etc. and replace components out. Here's an example of what I mean: http://i.imgur.com/GObRKQq.png http://i.imgur.com/GObRKQq.png Please star us on GitHub and feel free to fork us and join our community, I'd love to hear what you guys think on how we can improve even more. :) -- psychobunny, core dev @NodeBB
pbreit 12y ago
There's gotta be better forums design that emphasizes the content more. There's so much forum software where the chrome overwhelms the content.
hexleo 12y ago
From web but unlike web, it can work with desktop, it's great. Work on both mobile and desktop is the future.
martindale 12y ago
Wow, this suffers from most of the same problems that phpBB did/does, in that it tries to be too many things at once. Do one thing, and do it well.

285 points by vecio 12y ago

yannis 12y ago

Is there a demo somewhere?

dhawalhs 12y ago
https://community.nodebb.org/ https://community.nodebb.org/
- q_no 12y ago
  Oh dear, this look like the pinterest of forums. I find this layout very confusing. Dunno if I'm too for this but.... Back in my days, a forum hat a clearly structured (table)layout which gave a perfect overview in a matter of seconds. Pepperidgefarm remembers! ;)
hackerboos 12y ago
They really need a demo link in the header.

n0rm 12y ago

Bad design. Throws the information at the user and expects attention.

franze 12y ago
harsh words but true. "modern web" should not be synonymous with "ugly tile design" "annoying fade in / fade out whole page animations" "onscroll something happens stuff"
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

dewey 12y ago

Very interesting project, but I have to say I'm not a big fan of the fade-in/fade-out animations while navigating the forum. It'll get annoying very fast. The forum home page is a bit cluttered imo, especially with all the latest post quotes. And obviously the javascript hijacking the scrolling behaviour on the landing page is something which I always find quite annoying, but it seems to be en vogue at the moment. I hope this doesn't sound too negative, just a few things I noticed while browsing the demo.

arghbleargh 12y ago
Yes, I found the latest post quotes to be rather distracting. There is no context for the posts (not even thread name), so it's all wasted space for me. Maybe it would be more useful to show something like recently commented threads and maybe a preview of latest posts in that thread if you hover. Some other issues for me: * The usernames do not appear next to the avatars in the posts, and generally users are identified by avatar rather than username. This is very confusing, especially since avatars can change, and it's hard to distinguish faces in images that small. * Along the same lines, icons are used all over the place instead of text. I find this annoying, as the icons are not self-explanatory, and I have to hover over every little icon in order to understand what I can do. For example, I had no idea what the "topics" and "posts" icons meant before hovering. Similarly, there is no reason to use text in the navigation bar (add an icon next to the text if you must). To be fair, the icons have the advantage of taking up less space on mobile. * The styling was a bit jarring to me, with the high contrast and lack of strong borders between elements. The whole purpose of going to a forum is to read a lot of text, so it makes sense to use more neutral background colors. Of course, this can be customized I'm sure, so this is more feedback on the demo site rather than the platform. But overall the implementation seemed solid, and I can see this eventually becoming a nice BB platform. Edit: this is all based on https://community.nodebb.org/ https://community.nodebb.org/.
- Scuzz 12y ago
  We use NodeBB at http://bitbangers.co.uk/ http://bitbangers.co.uk/ but with a different theme. You should take a look and see how different it is. http://convoe.com/ http://convoe.com/ also uses NodeBB with a completely different theme.

pibefision 12y ago

UI seems very complex

higherpurpose 12y ago
Yeah, column based UI seems pretty overwhelming at first sight.

chrislomax 12y ago

I think I was expecting it to be a normal forum layout but faster. I must admit, it didn't feel faster. The fade feels like a cop out on speed and acting as a mask. Also when going onto the forum, I was clicking links but nothing was happening? Then I would click the home button and the last button I had clicked would then activate, like it was a click behind? The home layout reminds me of hootsuite, I find the layout too cluttered. I'd imagine you would get used to it and you would know where to look eventually but I must admit it wasn't very intuitive. The plus points are that I do think the world needs an overhaul on forum software, it's tired and hasn't changed much in 15 years. I don't think this has been done in vain. The feature set looks good I just don't think you need the fading transitions and so much information all over the place. It needs simplifying; in my opinion.

Fuxy 12y ago
That's weird seems to be responsive enough for me it's not extremely faster then anything else however it's not slow either. Compared to some forums the would be a very big improvement in loading speed. As far as the layout is concerned it's not intuitive i haven't seen anything similar so it takes a little getting used to however that doesn't mean it's bad. Edit: I guess it's getting slightly slower now with the HN effect however I only noticed it going back to the home page.

mrmondo 12y ago

Lack of UX & no ACID compliance so I wouldn't use it for anything in production.

aikah 12y ago
what do you mean no ACID compliance ? the db used? And can you be more specific about what's wrong with the UX?
- mrmondo 12y ago
  Correct, regardless of what redis tries to sell itself as it is not a database I would trust my data with long term. As far as UX goes the demo site was incredibly hard to use, it doesn't lead your eyes trough a path of workflow, not to mention that narrow vertical columns are a highly inefficient way to digest data.
  - cwyers 12y ago
    Is an online forum an application where you have to worry about trusting your database? If you lose a forum post now and then, it's not a good thing, certainly, but depending on the forum, it could be an acceptable tradeoff.
    - Argorak 12y ago
      Considering that a forum is also not the most high-traffic kind of application, I do not see the reason why you should use a high-performance K/V-store (with all the tradeoffs coming with it).
eurleif 12y ago
Redis is fully durable if you use append-only files with the "appendfsync always" option set. http://oldblog.antirez.com/post/redis-persistence-demystified.html http://oldblog.antirez.com/post/redis-persistence-demystifie...
- 12y ago

hhandoko 12y ago

Have they recently moved to a different pricing model? The homepage says free, but the pricing page states $35 - $100/month. I would guess they mean self-host is free, and the prices refers to hosted / managed instances. In which case, they should make this point much clearer.

joeyspn 12y ago
Correct. That's how they intend to make money, but self-hosted is free..

collyw 12y ago

Does "modern web" mean it has to be Node based? Unless you are expecting a hell of a lot of traffic, I wouldn't have thought a BB was a particularly suitable use case for node (correct me if I am wrong).

kenster07 12y ago
Node would be useful for the chat feature that one can see in the screenshots.
- Rapzid 12y ago
  Because they are using node and they were needing to implement a chat feature?
euank 12y ago
"modern web" doesn't have to be node based, but just about any web app is a suitable use case for node. The exceptions are web-apps that require heavy backend computation (javascript/node sucks at that), but even then you could use node + a work queue that's handled by a more appropriate language. Nodejs has arguably the best websocket implementation of any language and has mature drivers for pretty much every database backend. It has various templating frameworks etc. A BB just needs a database at the backend and a way to get that data out to a browser. In that regard, nodejs is more suited than many other languages. I don't really get your comment since it seems to imply that writing it in nodejs comes at some cost and you need to justify that cost by saying you expect a lot of traffic. I've seen this attitude before when someone writes something in assembly.. "Oh, you're hand-optimizing your program's assembly? Unless you really need that performance I wouldn't think it's worth it to use assembly". The thing is, nodejs doesn't have all that many problems. Sure, there's the massive number of warts of javascript, but people have learned to write readable and less-buggy code in the javascript ecosystem at this point (promises, jslint, etc). So to repeat my answer to your question: no it doesn't have to be nodejs to be "modern web", but I do think nodejs is appropriate for this use case.
- collyw 12y ago

bolaft 12y ago

The threads themselves are pretty good looking but the forum main page (https://community.nodebb.org/ https://community.nodebb.org/) is really cluttered and confusing. Also, why are there upvote/downvote buttons on thread messages? Do they have any effect on visibility or are they just for show?

Scuzz 12y ago
Their main forum home page is a theme called Lavender which is quite busy. There are other themes available that are less cluttered and busy, Vanilla and Cerulean are a lot nicer in my opinion.

retejo 12y ago

I have used this before, in just my first week I had multiple crashes. DO NOT USE THIS FOR PRODUCTION YET.

BuckRogers 12y ago
Judging from the looks of it, I won't be using it in production ever.

deleted 12y ago

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hpaavola 12y ago

Some obsevervations while using https://community.nodebb.org/ https://community.nodebb.org/ Kinetic scrolling on Firefox for Android is broken. Do not fiddle with scrolling when doing web development, ever. I guarantee that you will fail. Front page forgets the scroll position when coming back with back button (Firefox, Windows 7). When you do AJAX stuff (or websockets or anything else not plain HTTP GET that browsers do when you click normal link), always show progress indicator right after you user clicks something. Now when the site is slow (because of HN effect?) user is shown blank page while the page is changing. All I can see is the top bar and the grey background after clicking any link. It takes 2-3 seconds before anything visible shows up. During this time always show some progress indicator. Going back and forth quickly occasionally gives user a wrong page. For example right now my URL bar shows https://community.nodebb.org/topic/7/nodebb-plugins https://community.nodebb.org/topic/7/nodebb-plugins but content is a post by quahfamili posted 12 months ago with title Testing. Bulletin board system gains nothing from "single page application" style architecture, it is a collection of documents, stick with it. EDIT: Also, when using infinite scroll, do not put anything in the page footer. Now when the pages have copyright info and couple links in there, I can see those only for a split of a second before new content appears. Makes me go crazy.

briantakita 12y ago
> Bulletin board system gains nothing from "single page application" style architecture, it is a collection of documents, stick with it. Saying Nothing is to be gained is going a bit far. This is an interesting experiment, with some novelty, that will be iterated upon. I presume that the bugs will also be fixed.
- hpaavola 12y ago
  Yes, I was a bit too harsh. My point is that discussion forum is almost completly just a collection of documents. Traditional web pages serve that structure really well.
  - andybak 12y ago
    I agree although I can see value in a pjax style approach to get faster page reloads. As long as you preserve normal behaviour and url structure, this is usually a win-win. EDIT - just checked and it does a moderately good job without javascript: "Your browser does not seem to support JavaScript. As a result, your viewing experience will be diminished, and you have been placed in read-only mode." This is probably an acceptable compromise. Just to clarify - I'm not arguing that everything should work with js disabled - just that it's a good litmus test for whether a website is fairly robust with regard to normal HTTP behaviour.

davidjgraph 12y ago

My issue is with the top level design used (aside from the fact we seemed to have pushed it over). The root, https://community.nodebb.org/ https://community.nodebb.org/, is a Pininterest/Google+/other tiling Each of these forums is ultra-old-school BB threaded style conversations. It's a very weird mix of old and new ideas that doesn't work for me. The reason I don't like these threaded conversations is once they go beyond a certain length, the only people who read or post to them are those that participated in the start of thread. It's just a way of having a public conversation. For anyone coming in later they need the question and the final answer - SO. This isn't really news, there's a reason StackOverflow works, it's brutal quality filtering. I think a lot of people would still love to see a decent OS SO clone. OSQA is just dead. http://www.question2answer.org/ http://www.question2answer.org/ is the only active one I'm aware of.

scrollaway 12y ago
I'm surprising myself: I actually like it! It's refreshing to see people trying new ideas. And when I thought about the main page further, I kinda realized that a table-listing of forums is not great. Best of wishes to this project. You left a lasting impression in barely a few seconds. I'm impressed.
Mahn 12y ago
Not everything on the internet is of a Question-Answer form. There are cases when a SO style forum doesn't cut it, think for example online games/MMORPGs. That being said, I'm not digging that tiled design on the main page either. I think a list view would work fine, not need to reinvent the wheel there as long as the underlying technology is modern and robust.
lfuller 12y ago
Many forums are exactly that - a public conversation. Not everyone who makes a post on a forum is looking for an answer per se.
octagonal 12y ago
I think the Pinteresque tiling home page might work if the information density were to be increased by quite a lot. What bothers me most is how you can only see the name of the board and the two/three most recent comments. What does that provide in terms of information? Not much IMO. The forum itself just seems like the same 90's forum from yesteryear with a new glossy coating. Once you've gotten used to the Reddit/HN way to manage content you simply can't go back to that.

leorocky 12y ago

This reminds me of Atwood's Discourse. I don't know if there's anything broken with old forums. They don't have the whizbang features, but it's nice to not load a gimmicky JavaScript UI that adds no value to what is essentially a way to post and read messages.

hrrsn 12y ago
A lot of these new style forums confuse the hell out of me. I miss the good days of Invision Power Board. Discourse is the only one I've liked so far.

vertex-four 12y ago

Is there really any reason to use Javascript as a layout engine for what is really a traditional forum that we've been doing in HTML/CSS since the dawn of the web? Frankly, it feels slow and clunky to load, as each component loads individually and re-positions everything else. Page switching feels horribly slow as well. This is a case of single-page-appification of something that really isn't an app at heart, but is simply a content-centric website.

krapp 12y ago
The only reason I can think of - and admittedly I can't prove it but it seems intuitive - would be the assumption that pushing rendering to the browser and breaking requests up into fine-grained AJAX requests or doing resorting in the browser, takes some burden off the server. Why should you have to reload an entire page, for instance, when a thread only contains one new comment? Browsers aren't dumb terminals so let them do some of the work. Of course this is assuming the javascript isn't also piling on a bunch of nifty effects as well. For me, though, it seems to load really quickly.
- vertex-four 12y ago
  You can solve that with React.JS rendering on the server, then again on the client once the page has been downloaded. That makes the page render quickly, then it acts as a single-page app once loaded, without appearing to be jerky and presenting either a loading screen or a half-loaded page which takes multiple seconds to load fully. Twitter do this for their web interface (although not via React).

edwinyzh 12y ago

I did registered, maybe it's just me, but real don't like it's UX... So I did a little more search and found this: https://github.com/cnodejs/nodeclub/ https://github.com/cnodejs/nodeclub/ the UI looks much simpler and neat, but I haven't dig into any of them further though...

kmfrk 12y ago

While I'm not sold on the software, I'm glad to see more competition in the field of forum CMSes. :)

cs02rm0 12y ago

I think the general level of criticism seems a bit harsh. It's perfectly usable even under the weight of at least HN, quite a lot of effort has clearly gone into it. There's some edges that want polishing, particularly around page transitions but I don't see much from a quick look or any of the comments that couldn't be resolved in short order. Most of the issues are where they've been a little keen to apply effects. I'm not sure I'll ever warm to javascript on the server for my own needs, but good luck to them I say.

Scuzz 12y ago

This forum software is quite new and they are only on the 0.4.x version. It is still under heavy development with lots of changes and fixes being implemented all the time. I use this NodeBB for one of my forums and I have no issues with it. The only complaints I have had was to do with a plugin and not the actual NodeBB software. Their main theme at the moment is called Lavender and I do find it cluttered and a bit busy but there are other themes available to use. They do tend to change the theme with each major release so when 0.5.0 comes out soon there may be another theme for you to check out. The plugin and widget system they have is very useful with new plugins being developed all the time. The infinite scroll can be turned off. I have had a few issues with upgrades but that was down to me a slight version error on their upgrade script.

deleted 12y ago
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bobcostas55 12y ago

Ah, the "modern web". Where hipsters have to take something that was perfectly fine and ruin it by re-implementing it badly in the latest fad language. Love it!

thegeomaster 12y ago
I feel ya. And Javascript is ugly, I personally would never use it if I didn't absolutely have to. What's more, Node.js code tends to look horrible with all the callback indentation and spaghetti. An async server's programming environment and style could have been done way more gracefully.
thathonkey 12y ago
Javascript isn't really a fad. Server-side JS isn't going to be a fad either, hate to break it to you.
- romanovcode 12y ago
  Just like RoR wasn't a fad? It's practically gone nowadays because most RoR devs switched to NodeJs.
  - thathonkey 12y ago
    JavaScript has quite a few advantages compared to RoR (eg. it will forever be the language in browser, hence if you choose Node then you are using the same language on both sides. This is the main reason I think it won't be a fad like Ruby. Also Node is way faster than RoR on average). So no, nothing like that.

capex 12y ago

Kinetic scrolling doesn't let me go through your site how I'd like to. It zips past, in one flick I am at the footer.

guiomie 12y ago

Since this is a link to a github repo, I checked the source code. I personally using tabs as opposed to 2 or 3 spaces makes the code ugly. Can someone help me undertand "require('./user/auth')(User); " ?? from https://github.com/NodeBB/NodeBB/blob/master/src/user.js https://github.com/NodeBB/NodeBB/blob/master/src/user.js

runj__ 12y ago
It initializes the Auth module with the User object. The Auth module in turn extends the User object with the property 'auth'. The auth property is then extended with a 'logAttempt' function and a 'clearLoginAttempts' function. The User object in the parent context can then use these properties. Oh, and I agree that the tabbing makes it look ridiculous. Javascript should use two spaces, nothing more, nothing less (let the fight begin).
- b3n 12y ago
  > Oh, and I agree that the tabbing makes it look ridiculous. Javascript should use two spaces, nothing more, nothing less (let the fight begin). That's not the code's fault, GitHub should set the tab-size[1] property to something more legible. [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-text/#tab-size http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-text/#tab-size
deleted 12y ago
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Q_the_Novice 12y ago
Also found the coding style a bit complicated and confusing - looks like they are passing the User module to other modules(in this case the auth module) and adding methods.
- guiomie 12y ago
  Yah, the module is actually an exported function. Makes sense, but a bit confusing.
12y ago

jstsch 12y ago

I went comparing forum software the other day, last time I did was 10 years ago. Wanted to get a nice and simple forum up 'n running in a couple of hours. PhpBB is still the top hit when searching. But come on, we can do better than that? So tried Discourse, but the Docker-only installation turned me off (a magic black box). After getting it to run for a bit, apparently something crashed and got a gateway timeout. No Docker experience, so couldn't easily get in and get some log data. Hard to debug. After killing the container and restarted it worked again... not wanting to learn docker for setting up a simple forum (trying to avoid the rabbit hole). And how am I gonna update this box? Then a look at NodeBB. Too immature, a little bit funky UI and also relatively hard to deploy. Don't have NodeJS running on one of our production servers. Ended up with VanillaForums: untar... welcome screen... db credentials... go! Much cleaner than PhpBB and simple to setup. Styling was a breeze too. A couple of hours later I had a forum matching our identity up 'n running. Don't want setup and maintenance hell for something as simple as a forum...

krapp 12y ago
Unfortunately, it doesn't seem there's a lot of work being put into a new generation of PHP forums. VanillaForums looks interesting though.
- babuskov 12y ago
  About a year ago a friend and I tried to build a social network for some niche and forums were one of the functions. It is pure LAMP code, written in Yii framework. Since the project failed, I'm trying to get all the rights to publish the code under GPL. My plan is to also run a small social site for programmers as a proof of concept and having a real-world website where the code works. Of course, there are some things specific to our project which I need to remove/refactor first, but it is not too much work. If anyone is interested in beta-testing when I release the first public version on github, please drop me an e-mail and I'll let you know when it's ready (my e-mail is in my profile).
  - krapp 12y ago
    Out of curiosity, why Yii?

Xspirits 12y ago

The prices are totally abusive ! https://nodebb.org/pricing https://nodebb.org/pricing $75 monthly for MAX 2,500 users, seriously ?

deleted 12y ago
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TimWolla 12y ago
You are aware that this is the hosted solution? You can get NodeBB at GitHub if you want it to host yourself.

cabalamat 12y ago

At the moment this uses the same notation ("...") both to show and to hide quoted text. A simple improvement would be to use different text for these inverse operations (perhaps + and -, or >> and <<).

psychobunny 12y ago

Thanks for the feedback and all. Wish we'd get on this page a few months from now because we're still in heavy development. Bugs and all that - our community/demo is pretty much running a nightly build ;) Just wanted to say, the "pinterest" homepage is just a theme. We've got an extensible API and an easy (hopefully) theming engine. Just to show you how different it can look like, open up http://convoe.com http://convoe.com, give it a shot on your mobile as well - it's awesome. There are some themes out there that have a basic traditional view as well. I'd like to say we're really working on the engine a lot, and once everything is stable we'll blow full steam ahead on cool themes, some traditional, some "modern" (whatever you like to think of that as). We also have almost 100 plugins in such a short amount of time, which hopefully shows how extensible our forum is. We also have a widget system - you can drag and drop widgets on the home/sidebar/header etc. and replace components out. Here's an example of what I mean: http://i.imgur.com/GObRKQq.png http://i.imgur.com/GObRKQq.png Please star us on GitHub and feel free to fork us and join our community, I'd love to hear what you guys think on how we can improve even more. :) -- psychobunny, core dev @NodeBB

pbreit 12y ago

There's gotta be better forums design that emphasizes the content more. There's so much forum software where the chrome overwhelms the content.

hexleo 12y ago

From web but unlike web, it can work with desktop, it's great. Work on both mobile and desktop is the future.

martindale 12y ago

Wow, this suffers from most of the same problems that phpBB did/does, in that it tries to be too many things at once. Do one thing, and do it well.