topic-2

20 Dec 2014, 15:50

I've always been a fan of forums.Ever since I was 12 years old, I was heavily involved in forums and building communities.

Over the years I used phpBB, vBulletin and other solutions I can't even remember now.

The past few weeks I've been looking around on how to build up a communityaround book lovers, since I already have a good following on Facebook and I could funnel that traffic to a community of my own.

After weeks of thinking what could I do, I started looking around social networks. But I didn't find what I was looking for, so I thought of building a forum.

Problem was that phpBB and all those solutions are old(I stopped coding in PHP since version 3...), I wasn't that convinced on going that route.

After installing MyBB I was convinced I couldn't build a community on that. It looked so 2000. Plus, developing something for it would be a pain in the ass for me.

So then I tried BuddyPress and bbPress... I even bought a $59 theme for it which I couldn't get a refund for it. It was slow and clumsy, I couldn't understand the interface, hell... this wasn't what I was looking for. I almost quit my plans.

But after looking around for modern forum softwares... I found several SaaS solutions which looked wonderful. But I prefer to run things in my own place. You know that saying "Never build your house on someone else's land", well it's true. It happened to me in real life and happened to me in virtual land too (specially after Facebook's last algorithm update which lowered my page's reach).

I searched for self-hosted solutions and found Discourseand it looked very nice to me. I thought "this is it, I think I can work with this". Then I went to see the specs.

Man, that didn't look good.

Installation guide? Awful. I mean, I'm no noob to this world, but the whole process was a pain in the ass.

Then I got this bright idea...

"I've been coding stuff in node.js for the past year, and I feel comfortable on it. I wonder...

Is there a node.js forum software that's modern and I could work with?"

I wasn't sure before asking "know-it-all" Google. My experience with CMS in node is that they are still very basic.

If only there was something interesting...

So I typed... "node forum software". And I hit "enter".

I found nodeBB.

It looked very, very interesting.

Looks modern and felt sharp and crispy. Check.
Responsive theme. Check.
Plugins. Check.
Installation. Bit of a pain in the ass, but fine after tweaking around with the server and other things. Check.
Stability. 290 users registered, 22,000 pageviews in one day. Seems fine so far. Check.

And so far, I've been checking the documents and started to modify some things along the way.

Then I hit a roadblock with one of the plugins. I submitted an issue request in their git plugin. I see it's from one of the coders for this software @julian. He answered a couple minutes later.

Superb. Awesome. I never write so much, but the whole experience has made me write this post.

I hope to be able to contribute with plugins in the nearby future. I'm really grateful.

10 replies

Last reply 2 Nov 2013, 11:16

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2 years later

JasperNL @Esteban Constante

7 May 2011, 22:5

@Esteban-Constante now that makes sense.

7 replies

Last reply 2 Nov 2013, 11:16

Someone

28 Aug 2017, 11:49

Well you already have me down in your list, but thought I would drop by and say hi from everyone here at Team Kano

Kano website
Talk Kano forum

I deal with the general running and administration of the lovely forums, most crucially making sure it stays looking pretty

I come to the NodeBB forums looking for enlightenment and assistance in dealing with nuisance spammers

102

Someone else

1 Dec 2012, 17:13

Last week we migrated the Qt project forums to NodeBB.
All the feedback has been really positive.

The new Qt Forums at: http://forum.qt.io

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Pinned by

Julian 5 days ago

hnahli

19 Oct 2015, 2 :13

After having been called forum of the week on the 23rd May, I might announce it here now as well.

We are quite an old German speaking C++ community on the internet. It goes back to the 1997/98. The previous forum was opened in 2001 and was a phpBB2. We expanded and maintained that phpBB2 ourselves for 17 years until I finally had enough of the horrible code and design of 2001. I wrote my own plugin and migrated with a modified NodeBB. We took over post IDs and topic IDs, converted all BBCode (including our custom extensions) over to Markdown and thus took all the data with us. This means about 2.25 millions posts distributed over about 280,000 topics with nearly 35,000 users. The migrations plugin took 15-16 hours to convert all this data.

So far quite happy with the new forum. It opens up a lot of new possibilities for us. Also helps with search indexes since it is now mobile friendly. Also it is now mobile friendly . I think the majority of the community is also happy with the modernization and new users to the site will probably be more familiar with such a modern design and with Markdown.

We are still missing some stuff from the previous forum and have some open wishes for additional features or improvements. But I will work on this stuff and hopefully share it via core contributions or plugins with the community of NodeBB.

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