Anyone switching from NodeBB?

zenkamal

HISTORY: I went from Discourse to NodeBB, while monitoring esoTalk. Flarum might be too sleek to ignore ... anyone switching from NodeBB, and if so why?

The NodeBB features I like that keep me there for now are:

-Upvote/downvote posts
-Real time 1-on-1 user chat/message (within the software)
-Easy social sign-on

The Flarum features I like are:

-Obviously easier to implement
-Nicer looking (letter avatars, overall aesthetic)
-Toby is in medicine, and that means he must be detail-oriented

The features I'd like that neither have:

-Badges! Like stackexchange, of which I was a moderator for a few years and have fond memories.

Wombat

The only feature that nodebb has is it's websockets based. Other than that, those features you mentioned can be easily done within flarum's core as an extension.

zenkamal

Wombat Sold! Well almost. Plugins/extensions turned out to be a big issue with NodeBB ... creators would forget to update them, they'd break, etc. So I'm a bit wary of heavy-use of extensions, but not irrationally and unfixably wary.

Wombat

zenkamal Ha, I'm not trying to sell anything but thanks for the compliment! 🙂

I just think nodebb only has the websocket feature going for it.. which is not a bad thing, but....

And it's quite possible in the future to create and extension for flarum that connects to a nodejs server, to essentially turn it into a websocket platform as well. This depends on how flarum will manage their extensions and hopefully we'll beable to tap into anything we want and manipulate any code as well. So we can create powerful extensions! There is really no limit.

I do agree though, I love the badge implementation. FontAwesome utilization is great for the modern web as well, the icons look great.

Fastidious

Wombat unless I am missing something, there is no knowledge of APIs, or anything else that would make this a true, known assertion. At this point, this is hearsay, @zenkamal.

Fastidious

zenkamal Plugins/extensions turned out to be a big issue with NodeBB ... creators would forget to update them, they'd break, etc.

Completely agree. Not only that, sloppy way to do things (extension creators programing) will create other problems and potentially break havoc. Extensions, other than those shipped with the product, can be a snake's nest.

Wombat

Fastidious Well, we'll see here once it's released in beta. Although, I think we'll beable to control and create a lot more than we think 🙂

HolyPhoenix

First, I feel I should say, I love NodeBB a lot. I am not switching though, because currently I don't use NodeBB. It doesn't offer the features I need to keep my community happy. Part of the reason is the plugins.

Extensions were a big problem for NodeBB, and the reason is that they continually had breaking changes in base. I could end up being wrong, but I believe Toby and Franz put in a pretty solid core for extensions. I don't believe they will have a lot of breaking changes as time goes. It isn't even beta though, so they definitely could make the changes. But from knowing how they were they were getting everything pretty much solid the way it will be before pushing beta. I don't think the architecture will change a lot after beta is released. At least not until the next rewrite version of it down the road in maybe 10 years when technology has changed.

tarun

@Toby Are you planning a migrator from NodeBB to Flarum?

zenkamal

NodeBB has a cool explainer video out now. While a Flarum explainer video is probably priority number 1 zillion, it would also be cool.

https://community.nodebb.org/topic/6301/didn-t-see-this-coming

Wombat

zenkamal That video is a bunch of bullshit. Sorry for the language, but they really screwed up on the marketing part.

A forum is not what keeps your business active, your forum is active because of your business! They have it completely wrong. You could have an amazing community, and if you're running phpbb2 it will still thrive just as strong. It's the community you HAVE that what makes your forum active, not the forum itself. They are marketing it as 'Oh, if you use NodeBB, you'll automatically get an active forum and your customer's will stay!!', yeah no. Unfortunately, that's not how it works.

This is evident from a plethora of online forums. Look at JLA Forums and, the old GTAForums that were 1.3 and others. That still thrived... It's about the content, not the forum. The forum software plays a small role in whether or not your community will stay or be active. It plays a role, but not as much as they are marketing it.

Wombat

I also just noticed nodebb doesn't use any compression algorithms for their websocket data. Which is.. not good.

Over 90kb of data that was sent ACROSS the pipe by scrolling down 4 pages. Ew ew and ew. Flarum uses far less (around 7 to 9kb per page) with gzip and is just as fast. If they are going to market a websocket forum, they better have better optimization than an ajaxified forum software... There are really no benefits AFAIK.

They need to look at LZ string http://pieroxy.net/blog/pages/lz-string/index.html which works awesome under node and has a clientside js api that works fine for decompression and is like less than 3kb's.

Fastidious

Wombat I doesn't even matters. NodeBB is the fastest loading, responsive, forum I have ever encountered--even faster than Discourse, which is extremely fast as well.

zenkamal

Wombat Ha, I just meant "cool video made in the explainer style" 🙂 Yeah, some of the best forums interaction-wise are ugly as hell.

Meow

Wombat I don’t understand why there are many videos like that— just talking but not showing what it really is.