Nodebb vs discourse showdown
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So my favorite deal site fatwallet had announced that they are closing. I started a new community site phatwalletforums.com running nodebb and a few days later some of the charter members of the finance forum started their own site fragiledeal.com. I tried to warn them about the dangers of , but they seem determined, at least for now.
Anybody want to join me and maybe offer some help?
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First question: How many unicorn workers are you willing to let your workers run?
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@tsaukpaetra said in Nodebb vs discourse showdown:
First question: How many unicorn workers are you willing to let your workers run?
I'm pretty sure I'm whooshing here
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@dangeruss said in Nodebb vs discourse showdown:
@tsaukpaetra said in Nodebb vs discourse showdown:
First question: How many unicorn workers are you willing to let your workers run?
I'm pretty sure I'm whooshing here
Unicorn is one of the vast multitude of subprocesses used by Discourse for... Some unknown and unknowable thing.
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@dangeruss Help you do what?
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@dangeruss said in Nodebb vs discourse showdown:
@tsaukpaetra said in Nodebb vs discourse showdown:
First question: How many unicorn workers are you willing to let your workers run?
I'm pretty sure I'm whooshing here
Web workers are served via unicorn, this process is capable of serving one request at a time, you should at least have one worker per CPU. You can increase this number in your template like so
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@dangeruss said in Nodebb vs discourse showdown:
some of the charter members of the finance forum started their own site fragiledeal.com. I tried to warn them about the dangers of , but they seem determined
Well, if our experience was in any way typical, it sounds like they got the "fragile" part right.
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@pjh said in Nodebb vs discourse showdown:
@dangeruss said in Nodebb vs discourse showdown:
@tsaukpaetra said in Nodebb vs discourse showdown:
First question: How many unicorn workers are you willing to let your workers run?
I'm pretty sure I'm whooshing here
Web workers are served via unicorn, this process is capable of serving one request at a time, you should at least have one worker per CPU. You can increase this number in your template like so
Been a while since I've seen a site that naked...
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@dangeruss said in Nodebb vs discourse showdown:
So my favorite deal site fatwallet had announced that they are closing. I started a new community site phatwalletforums.com running nodebb and a few days later some of the charter members of the finance forum started their own site fragiledeal.com. I tried to warn them about the dangers of , but they seem determined, at least for now.
Anybody want to join me and maybe offer some help?
What are the dangers of using ? I know of none.
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@pie_flavor said in Nodebb vs discourse showdown:
@dangeruss said in Nodebb vs discourse showdown:
So my favorite deal site fatwallet had announced that they are closing. I started a new community site phatwalletforums.com running nodebb and a few days later some of the charter members of the finance forum started their own site fragiledeal.com. I tried to warn them about the dangers of , but they seem determined, at least for now.
Anybody want to join me and maybe offer some help?
What are the dangers of using ? I know of none.
SIDE EFFECTS OF Obama not being re-elected for a third term The next 10 years Topic drift Dwarf Fortress screenshots jbobauclisezborstidjikemclidu'eselri'a The god of fire and war comes to blow up a giant purple dildragonOver-reliance on specific non-plural numbers of boxing Breast Programming Large topics with no clearly defined subject Jeff (verb)
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@pie_flavor bringing a 4GB VPS to its knees with a single carefully crafted post that was IIRC 32kb of text.
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@arantor said in Nodebb vs discourse showdown:
bringing a 4GB VPS
needing that kind of hardware for even light use, but that is a symptom of the fact that during the design phase complicator gloves where not enough and an entire complicator battle suit was needed
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@arantor said in Nodebb vs discourse showdown:
@pie_flavor bringing a 4GB VPS to its knees with a single carefully crafted post that was IIRC 32kb of text.
A password, right?
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@tsaukpaetra no, it was a carefully crafted post.
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@arantor said in Nodebb vs discourse showdown:
it was a carefully crafted post.
all my posts are ... manually crafted with love and keyboard hammering
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@arantor said in Nodebb vs discourse showdown:
@tsaukpaetra no, it was a carefully crafted post.
Oh! Right! The recursive expansion one! Yeah, that was great...
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@tsaukpaetra said in Nodebb vs discourse showdown:
Been a while since I've seen a site that naked...
They're using unicorns, with slow clients. Or something.
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@ben_lubar You forgot melting people.
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@pie_flavor As I said repeatedly when WTDWTF used it, the worst bug in Dicksores was the people developing it.
I don't know what's happened since then, but at the time it was slow, bug-ridden, and prone to any number of failure states. However, the biggest problem was Jeff Atwood's insistence that there were no problems, and the sycophancy the other Discodevs gave him and his baby.
He wouldn't listen to anyone here, and eventually kicked everyone who had an account here off of Discourse.com Meta.d, the forum topic on the main Ducksauce website which he inexplicably insisted on using as the primary, and sole, bug tracking system.
Not that it mattered, since @wood would discount pretty much ever bug report given to him, insisting that it was a) the user's fault, b) irreproducible on his system (even when a dozen or more reports of the same problem arose from others), or c) working at designed and You Just Don't Get It.
Keep in mind that WTDWTF was the official testbed for at the time. And Jeff himself was a mod here, and had been so willing to abuse that to make the forum fit his ideal of 'civilized discourse' that a lot of people left and refused to return until the site stopped using Disk Whores - not because of the forum software, but because Jeff was being a dick.
A quick review of some of the posts from that period (which did get saved when the site finally fled to the refuge of NodeBB) should reveal a motherlode of ery, both about Dreksource and about @wood himself. Here, just to save time and make sure we're all on the same page, Let Me Google That For You.
I would start with the endless well of bile that is the Discopædia thread, a glossary of all the terms to express how much hate we held for Pisscourse. Notice all the pejorative nicknames for Discourse I've used in this post? All of those and worse were thrown around at that time.
Things Our Customers Have Said About Discourse is a good one if you like sarcasm and schadenfreude. My own quote about it was:
In any case, it is fair to say that trading CS for Dicksores is akin to exchanging being damned to lick Hades' butthole for all eternity, for endless reincarnations as a carrion beetle. Its still terrible, but not quite as terrible as the alternative.
And that was one of the less scathing opinions.
Oh, Discourse compiled several of the complaints of the time.
Is Using Discourse To Track Bugs a WTF? discusses the brillant idea behind meta.d, and just why it was a mistake.
How can this be so wrong??? (AKA the Discopocalypse thread) discussed how @wood shut the WTFers out of the process, an event known here as the Great Banning.
It Was a Fun Run later served as a post-mortem of the whole debacle once the move to NodeBB started. Note that at the time, NodeBB was at least as bad if not worse, and people still saw it as an improvement simply because the devs would listen to bug reports.
And the very existence of a thread entitled FUCK DISCOURSE discourse is invalid try to be less PIECE OF SHIT FUCK YOU ATWOOD ALEX FUCK ALL OF YOU! is rather indicative, even if it was created by Word of Blakey.
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This post is deleted!
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At the risk of shameless self-promotion, I want to added this post of mine, specifically this part:
To me, that's the real pisser about the whole Dicksores debacle. Discourse really did have the potential to be an improvement over existing forum software as it existed in 2007. It was ambitious, it took risks, it had some real thought put into it. The problem wasn't the design or the implementation (well, not the main problem, anyway, both had some serious problems but most could have been fixed or removed eventually), it was the messianic attitude Jeff developed while creating it. After his involvement with SO, and the mild popularity of his blog, he concluded that he knew forum software and moderation better than anyone, and he was determined to sail right into that iceberg - bug reports, jellypotatoes, and server cooties be damned.
A little further down mentions one of the most contentious aspects of Discourse as it existed then (and may still now, for all I know), the choice to make Infiniscroll a required feature.
Adding infiniwhine to was one of Jeff's best ideas. Making it mandatory was one of his worst. Even as a default setting, it is likely to piss more people off than it would please (though informing users of it and getting them to try it if it isn't the default is tricky), but not giving any choice at all was a disaster.
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@ben_lubar said in Nodebb vs discourse showdown:
Breast Programming
Um, actually, that's more of a Community Server thing.
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@boomzilla independent breast physics?
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@jaloopa ITYM ethics in breast physics.
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@scholrlea
Don't forget how bots where thought impossible by Jeff and how several people tried their hand at making improvements but failed at setting up a test environment or at getting basic stuff working
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@blakeyrat said in Nodebb vs discourse showdown:
@dangeruss Help you do what?
Customizing, figuring out what plugins to install and building new ones mostly .
Here are some of the requests:
- A forum deals summary page with the top 5 hottest/popular posts in each category
- Enable the underline button in the editor
- Poster enabled expiration date for the thread (after which it's moved to a different category)
- Mirroring threads in multiple categories
- All of the text in quotes and multi quotes should be 100% visible at all times without having to click that little arrow in a box to read them.
- Controlling the size of uploaded images.
- Sort posts by most votes
- A custom skin to make it look more like the old forum
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@scholrlea said in Nodebb vs discourse showdown:
and eventually kicked everyone who had an account here off of Discourse.com Meta.d,
A few escaped....
@scholrlea said in Nodebb vs discourse showdown:
And Jeff himself was a mod here
No, he was admin. He decided to try his hand at modding (just because he could) until he got told to stop. Well actually, he got told to stop a few times, and eventually capitulated.
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- A forum deals summary page with the top 5 hottest/popular posts in each category
There is precedent for doing this, but not within Discourse itself; it'd be on a separate page that makes REST calls into Discourse.
- Enable the underline button in the editor
If intended you to be able to underline, you'd be able to underline, you heathen! (This is supposedly supported via editor plugins; you'll have to ask @waffles on Stack Overflow or @sam on meta.d.)
- Poster enabled expiration date for the thread (after which it's moved to a different category)
There's some sort of problem with thread expiration dates where it's
O(n^2)
with the number of forum actions (posts or likes) due to how PostgreSQL indexes things or something. I don't remember if we found the cause or not, but as of when we moved to NodeBB it still wasn't fixed; any thread that expired would hold the site hostage for several minutes, to the point where we had a separate website for forecasting "server cooties" (since taken over by ransomware) caused by this and other similar problems. I recommend not doing this, and relying on moderators to manually move threads.- Mirroring threads in multiple categories
E_DOING_IT_WRONG
, though you might be able to take advantage of the tagging plugin.- All of the text in quotes and multi quotes should be 100% visible at all times without having to click that little arrow in a box to read them.
I think that's handled by a removable plugin, at least if you're not using Discourse Cloud. If you are using Discourse Cloud I don't know what to tell you.
- Controlling the size of uploaded images.
For physical storage size there's a setting for that somewhere plus another setting at the Unicorn server level. For on-screen dimensions you can use some CSS, though inline CSS will override it.
- Sort posts by most votes
While I know where exactly in the code you can change this, you don't want to because it's not indexed properly, and you wouldn't be able to get that modification into a running installation of Discourse because of how @sam packaged it. Sorry.
- A custom skin to make it look more like the old forum
While Jeff says , this should be 100% possible, again find @sam or guy-whose-avatar-looks-like-a-bowl-of-tomato-soup (sorry, don't remember the name) and they should be able to help.
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@twelvebaud said in Nodebb vs discourse showdown:
we had a separate website for forecasting "server cooties"
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@twelvebaud said in Nodebb vs discourse showdown:
since taken over by ransomware
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http://www.isitjustmeorservercooties.com/ - badware
http://www.isitjustmeorservercooti.es/ - badware
http://www.servercooties.com/ - Sedo parking
https://thereal.wtf/ - Working on subdomains onlyhttps://servercooties.io/ isn't on the list, though it is working.
Paging @sockdevs; though I still have commit privileges, I'm not sure I should be using them
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@twelvebaud We let most of those domains lapse a few months back, intentionally.
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@yamikuronue Totally on board with that, but the project description and
readme.md
still list them.
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@twelvebaud said in Nodebb vs discourse showdown:
ERR_NAME_NOT_RESOLVED
http://www.isitjustmeorservercooti.es/ - badware
ERR_NAME_NOT_RESOLVED
http://www.servercooties.com/ - Sedo parking
https://thereal.wtf/ - Working
https://servercooties.io/ isn't on the list, though it is working.
That's the one I looked at.
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@twelvebaud I've just updated the readme with the correct URLs.
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@twelvebaud said in Nodebb vs discourse showdown:
https://servercooties.io/ isn't on the list, though it is working.
I found it with google (for
server cooties
).
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First of all OMG @TwelveBaud is back. Weren't we waiting for him to do some mafia game or something?
Also I'm not sure if I was clear, but my site is running nodebb (the competitors are using discourse).
So The help I need is with regards to nodebb
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@raceprouk said in Nodebb vs discourse showdown:
@twelvebaud I've just updated the readme with the correct URLs.
Went to site, entered the Konami Code, nothing happened. I am disappoint.
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@dangeruss said in Nodebb vs discourse showdown:
I'm not sure if I was clear
You where not. Everybody (I think) believed you asked help with
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@dangeruss Sorry about that, let me make another pass. And the vendor point of contact is @julianlam, though he's (thankfully) not as involved here as @wood was.
- A forum deals summary page with the top 5 hottest/popular posts in each category
It sounds like you want a new endpoint under
Topics
for "sort by the count ofTopic.mainPid.
votes
", and definitely want an index for that. I don't know enough Mongo or Redis to help with that, but maybe someone here can.- Enable the underline button in the editor
You can use a plugin for that. Here's one for
ins
/del
/abbr
.- Poster enabled expiration date for the thread (after which it's moved to a different category)
I don't know of any built-in NodeBB scheduled tasks that could be used for this, and our customizations don't appear to have any, but if you find a way to run scheduled tasks you could attach bonus data to a
Topic
for the expiration date and have a scheduled task move it no problem.- Mirroring threads in multiple categories
I don't think it's currently feasable to build this into the database. You could, when designing your new forum skin, attach extra calls when bringing up a topic list to grab other topics. Alternatively, you could ignore categories and make the tagging plugin more prominent.
- All of the text in quotes and multi quotes should be 100% visible at all times without having to click that little arrow in a box to read them.
You can fix this when you create your own theme.
- Controlling the size of uploaded images.
I... think this is built in? @ben_lubar?
- Sort posts by most votes
Again, doable but requires weird nosql-fu beyond my ken.
- A custom skin to make it look more like the old forum
A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Here is that step. Here's the second.
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@twelvebaud said in Nodebb vs discourse showdown:
- Controlling the size of uploaded images.
I... think this is built in? @ben_lubar?
@twelvebaud said in Nodebb vs discourse showdown:
- Sort posts by most votes
Again, doable but requires weird nosql-fu beyond my ken.
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@jaloopa said in Nodebb vs discourse showdown:
@ben_lubar said in Nodebb vs discourse showdown:
?sort=most_votes
Also available in the UI
I must be missing a plugin, cuz this is what it looks like on my forum:
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@dangeruss @Jaloopa's screenshot is from the bottom of a single topic, for sorting posts. Your screenshot is from the bottom of a category or other topic list, for sorting topics.
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@twelvebaud said in Nodebb vs discourse showdown:
@dangeruss @Jaloopa's screenshot is from the bottom of a single topic, for sorting posts. Your screenshot is from the bottom of a category or other topic list, for sorting topics.
I don't know if I would want to sort posts by votes, I would probably want them in chronological order.
Topics on the other hand, I do want sorted by votes.
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@dangeruss said in Nodebb vs discourse showdown:
Topics on the other hand, I do want sorted by votes.
Misunderstanding on my part, then. Although in my defence you did say:
@dangeruss said in Nodebb vs discourse showdown:
Sort posts by most votes
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@jaloopa said in Nodebb vs discourse showdown:
@dangeruss said in Nodebb vs discourse showdown:
Topics on the other hand, I do want sorted by votes.
Misunderstanding on my part, then. Although in my defence you did say:
@dangeruss said in Nodebb vs discourse showdown:
Sort posts by most votes
My bad. Still why would people want posts sorted by votes? And why is there no mechanism to sort topics by votes? Is it because the votes don't bubble up to the topic level?
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@dangeruss said in Nodebb vs discourse showdown:
@jaloopa said in Nodebb vs discourse showdown:
@dangeruss said in Nodebb vs discourse showdown:
Topics on the other hand, I do want sorted by votes.
Misunderstanding on my part, then. Although in my defence you did say:
@dangeruss said in Nodebb vs discourse showdown:
Sort posts by most votes
My bad. Still why would people want posts sorted by votes? And why is there no mechanism to sort topics by votes? Is it because the votes don't bubble up to the topic level?
No, more like nobody thought of it. What would that even represent? Topic that has the most positivity?
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@scholrlea said in Nodebb vs discourse showdown:
Notice all the pejorative nicknames for Discourse I've used in this post? All of those and worse were thrown around at that time.
How could you leave out "Discurse?"
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@dangeruss said in Nodebb vs discourse showdown:
why would people want posts sorted by votes?
In quite narrow circumstances it makes some sense. Think something like the bad jokes thread, where posts aren't usually conversations but individual funnies. That said, I've used it like once