I’ve recently been come across NodeBB, a modern forum platform built with Node.js. It offers a sleek, responsive design and a ton of features like real-time notifications, plugin support, and integration with third-party services. From what I’ve seen so far, it seems like a solid choice for building a community.

 

 

I’m curious to hear your thoughts!

 

• Have you used NodeBB before?

 

 

• What do you think of its performance and ease of use?

 

 

• Are there any standout features or challenges you’ve encountered?

 

 

 

 

 

If you’re running or moderating a forum on NodeBB, feel free to share your experiences or tips.

 

 

There’s a demo that you can check out here: https://try.nodebb.org/

 

Their pricing is as followed:

[HEADING=1]Hamlet[/HEADING]

[HEADING=1]$100/Month[/HEADING]

[HEADING=1]USD[/HEADING]

• New startups and personal groups
  
• Up to 500,000 monthly page views
  
• 20 GB storage
  
• Standard email support, plus community forum support
  
• [HEADING=1]Village[/HEADING]
  [HEADING=1]$250/Month[/HEADING]
  [HEADING=1]USD[/HEADING]
  
  • Small startups, businesses, and groups
    
  • Up to 2 million monthly page views
    
  • 100 GB storage
    
  • Standard email support, plus community forum support
    
  • [HEADING=1]City[/HEADING]
    [HEADING=1]$750/Month[/HEADING]
    [HEADING=1][/HEADING]
    

Edited November 29, 2024Nov 29 by Cpvr

I have used it, quite extensively for a while. It was self hosted (this is an option) rather than their hosting, and it was a community of obscenely technical people (including from whom some of the NodeBB code ultimately came, because that community took issue with the use of MongoDB as a database, and wrote a layer for using Postgres instead which was later adopted by NodeBB)

 

As for ease of use, it's alright. The community in question was pushed onto Discourse at one point and spent 2 years thumbing their nose at Jeff Atwood and taking great sport in finding ways to break it, and eventually the decision was to move off Discourse to something else.

 

NodeBB was picked because it had enough of the things people liked - the live streaming of updates as you're reading, opt-in infinite scrolling - without too many of the downsides.

 

The most interesting aspects to contemplate for us traditional folks:

• theming is very minimal, just like Discourse, making the content more prominent
  
• there isn't the same scale of plugin ecosystem as there is for other platforms because most people run it out of the box or with very light customisation
  
• the whole Markdown/HTML with occasional bbcode does throw a few people
  

 

But for many communities, it's perfectly serviceable and modern feeling.

Looks great. Very lightweight. The only thing I hate is that it translates automatically half of the functionality. So I see a part in Dutch and the content in English. That's the only thing that disturbs me.

Huh, that's interesting - didn't know about that but I only speak three languages, two of which no browser autotranslates.

Huh, that's interesting - didn't know about that but I only speak three languages, two of which no browser autotranslates.

Yeah, it's quite annoying. It's not a big deal really, but it's annoying to me. 🙃

 

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Huh, it's like it's autodetected the forum language for the usual UI stuff (the stuff you'd normally get translated if you switched languages) and it jars because everything else is in English as expected.

NodeBB can be pricey. My forum is a NodeBB Forum.

Edited December 1, 2024Dec 1 by bdev

NodeBB can be pricey. My forum a NodeBB Forum.

It can be pricy if you’re not hosting it yourself, definitely.

Sometimes I regret using NodeBB because of the price and sometimes it is laggy because of my SQL Database choice and I can't change it now. If I knew about XenForo, we'd be using it ATM.

 

 

I still like how it looks

Which database did you choose?

 

I remember the site I was on for this started on MongoDB and converted to Postgres - but then again they also wrote the conversion layer to actually do that...