About the Development of Flarum

Alshain

First of all, I would like to start by thanking the Flarum team and the extension authors.

Flarum has a very beautiful structure in appearance.

Is it fast? It's fast but can be improved further.
It is much better than other software in terms of external view.
The Flarum support team is also extremely helpful. Everyone is trying their best, I see that.

However, there are some minor issues, which I have listed below.

Some Problems I've Seen

Indexing things that Google doesn't need to index. I think it's because of the "Mention" extension. Can we set these contents as no-index? I tried to do something with robots.txt, but I don't know if it works well. When we answer the question or tag someone, Google tries to index it. This is inconvenient, as:

Every site has a crawl budget. These answers or tags consume our scanning budget. Therefore, our other questions are not indexed.

When we consider the Giffgaff site, the last topic opened:
https://community.giffgaff.com/d/33493218-phone-working-in-italy

There are 33493218 questions, but when you make the following queries with Google;

site:community.giffgaff.com/d/

80000 questions were indexed.

site:https://community.giffgaff.com/d/*/1

Increase the 1 here as much as you can, you will see that very ridiculous content gets indexed. This is the first SEO problem I've seen.

Next href problem: Unfortunately, Google is trying to index it as well.

Avatar is added as png in default settings, which takes up a lot of space and causes the site to load slowly. I manually changed it to jpg, but I think it can be included in core files as well.
Avatars do not have width-height-alt values.

The Upload extension also does not have width-height-alt values.

If it can also be added, I think that better results will be obtained if the lazyload image feature can be added.
JS and CSS files can be minified better. When I test the js files in Discuss on any site on the internet,
Before: 1.12 MB
After: 1.08 MB
Saving: 3.5% (39.3 kB)
TTFB value is usually high. It may be related to the Tags extension, because when we disable that extension, the site really speeds up. But I don't know the source of the problem. I would be very happy if improvement can be made about TTFB 🙂

I have been using the Flarum infrastructure for years, there were times when I got very angry and wanted to change it. But I can't let it go because it looks very nice 🙂

These are the first things that come to mind, I'm so sorry if I was rude or offended you.

There are bound to be people involved in these problems. I would be very happy if they also write their opinions in the comments.

askvortsov

Grouping responses:

SEO

Alshain Increase the 1 here as much as you can, you will see that very ridiculous content gets indexed. This is the first SEO problem I've seen.

This one has (somewhat) been addressed in v1.2. Now the canonical URL is by page, not by post. This should cut down on indexing overlapping answers significantly.

Alshain Can we set these contents as no-index?

What in particular are you referring to here?

Alshain Next href problem: Unfortunately, Google is trying to index it as well.

<link rel="next" href="https://xx.yy/?page=2">

If we set this to no-follow, Google will only index the first page of each discussion. That feels incorrect.

Images and info

Alshain Avatar is added as png in default settings, which takes up a lot of space and causes the site to load slowly. I manually changed it to jpg, but I think it can be included in core files as well.

It would be nice to refactor our current implementation to support overriding png with jpg (or something else) on a forum-by-forum basis. PRs are welcome.

Alshain The Upload extension also does not have width-height-alt values.

This seems like a good feature to have there, although it would require storing that information somehow / embedding it into the image tags, which wouldn't be compatible with some formats (like markdown). Although "alt" text IS currently supported by markdown, it's just up to users to add it to their images.

In theory we could use the same height for every image, but that wouldn't capture the user's intent, and would be likely to cause frustration.

Alshain if the lazyload image feature can be added.

Probably, would be curious to see some experimentation on this. But this would require setting width/height of all images, and as previously mentioned, that's tricker than it seems.

Alshain JS and CSS files can be minified better.

Probably true, our current system for assembling JS from all extensions is somewhat hacky. One option could be serving a separate file for each extension's source code, but whether or not this is ultimately beneficial is uncertain. That being said, if your web server has gzip configured properly, these differences are neglidible.

Alshain TTFB value is usually high. It may be related to the Tags extension, because when we disable that extension, the site really speeds up. But I don't know the source of the problem. I would be very happy if improvement can be made about TTFB 🙂

This is another thing that we've been working on. In v1.0, we shipped a major refactor of how Tags works internally, significantly reducing TTFB for communities with many tags. I would be curious to hear more about your site, which extensions / versions you're using, and which extensions feel like they cause a big TTFB penalty.