nodeBB VS AnswerOverflow

> I'm a big fan of https://nodebb.org/

TIL to what shit Netgate moved pfSense forums to. I'm glad you are fine with it, but not only my FullHD monitor is not a smartphone, so I don't need 400% fonts on everything (and post dates on the faaaaar right clearly shows nobody ever even used the forum) and most importantly - search doesn't work. It's not like the previous forum had a good search, but at least it worked.

Bonus point: try to Ctrl+mousewheel on any NodeBB (including the official one).

NodeBB

You said it's based on. This means that there are modifications to the implementation of nodebb. So where is your modifications' source code then? stackfoss/stackfoss is just a single readme file

Obviously forums aren't as popular as they used to be, so this topic might not be of interest to many. For folks that want to run a forum, they'd most certainly go with Discourse (Ruby), Flarum (PHP), Xenforo (PHP), NodeBB (Javascript), Nimforum (Nim) and maybe Casnode (Go)

If you want to make your own app out of custom code that you will actively develop new features for, I think your points are true. But if you just wanted a modern version of the old phpBB forums, there are plenty of almost-turnkey projects/templates you can use. Check out NodeBB for instance. Maybe the barrier for entry is higher in a way, given increased complexity, but you also get more and nicer features "for free". I think it's a wash.

I was looking into actively maintained Rust based forum software similar to NodeBB (Node.js) or Discourse (Ruby on Rails) and Flaskbb (Python).

package: name: nodebb version: 2.5.3 dependencies: runtime: - nodejs environment: contents: packages: - alpine-baselayout - ca-certificates-bundle - nodejs - npm - git pipeline: - uses: fetch with: uri: https://github.com/NodeBB/NodeBB/archive/refs/tags/v${{package.version}}.tar.gz expected-sha256: 92e390d7cda190e7f098833cbbbf03fbe1c50f25653656ad589ae97dc18a7684 strip-components: 0 - runs: | mkdir -p "${{targets.destdir}}/usr/share/nodebb" cd NodeBB-${{package.version}} cp install/package.json . npm install --omit=dev cp -a ./. "${{targets.destdir}}/usr/share/nodebb"

> TOO many bots log entire channels out to public html sites. This is prevalent in everything like discord etc but the degree to it in IRC is just ridiculous god knows what any of those 1500 bots in a channel are doing.

These sorts of bots are quite rare on Discord, you usually have to make an account to be able to see anything. There have been attempts at standardizing this (like https://www.answeroverflow.com/) but they haven't taken off. Public logs are much more common on IRC than on Discord.

Related: AnswerOverflow makes Discord messages searchable on Google/ other search engines. It’s open source.

https://www.answeroverflow.com/

I agree that the discord centralization for Q&A is becoming problematic, it makes it less discoverable and searchable (Had this problem a lot with Svelte).

That said, I have had success so far using https://www.answeroverflow.com/ to search discord for questions. It sucks we have to use such tools, but given the current situation, it's also better to adapt.

We've started mirroring our Discord to the web using https://www.answeroverflow.com/

You could roll your own equivalent but AnswerFlow has some nice features and handles issues around consent nicely.

If you're starting a Discord then I'd strongly recommend stating upfront that you might mirror content to another location even if you're not doing it now - it makes it a lot easier than doing so further down the line.

A better solution would be to not use Discord but friction, push-back from my colleagues on alternatives and a fear of fragmenting the community made this the best option for us.