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Nodebb design

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  • When I first thought on the topic of how I would design a forum, I envisaged a mostly JS front-end app, using the back end to access the Database.
    That has some advantages and disadvantages. One negative is not being so good for SEO as more Server side rendered forums, if web crawlers dont run the JS to read the forum.

    How Nodebb builds its pages is different than I might have guessed. Its heavily reliant on Templating and CSS.

    Anyway before getting to that, I have been looking at how Nodebb builds its pages.

    On Nodebb forum one of the devs said
    The “read api” is used by the NodeBB frontend when loading pages
    The “write api” is preferred for server-to-server interactions.

    I asked for clarification on what server-to-server interactions might be?
    That part of my question was missed, can anyone add some explanation to help me understand?

  • @Panda said in Nodebb design:

    One negative is not being so good for SEO as more Server side rendered forums, if web crawlers dont run the JS to read the forum.

    From recollection, Google and Bing have the capability to read and process JS, although it’s not in the same manner as a physical person will consume content on a page. It will be seen as plain text, but will be indexed. However, it’s important to note that Yandex and Baidu will not render JS, although seeing as Google has a 90% share of the content available on the web in terms of indexing, this isn’t something you’ll likely lose sleep over.

    @Panda said in Nodebb design:

    The “write api” is preferred for server-to-server interactions.

    This is mostly based around overall security - you won’t typically want a client machine changing database elements or altering data. This is why you have “client-side” which could be DOM manipulation etc, and “server-side” which performs more complex operations as it can communicate directly with the database whereas the client cannot (and if it can, then you have a serious security flaw). Reading from the API is perfectly acceptable on the client-side, but not being able to write.

    A paradigm here would be something like SNMP. This protocol exists as a UDP (UDP is very efficient, as it is “fire and forget” and does not wait for a response like TCP does) based service which reads performance data from a remote source, thus enabling an application to parse that data for use in a monitoring application. In all cases, SNMP access should be “RO” (Read Only) and not RW (Read Write). It is completely feasible to assume complete control over a firewall for example by having RW access to SNMP and then exposing it to the entire internet with a weak passphrase.

    You wouldn’t do it (at least, I hope you wouldn’t) and the same ethic applies to server-side rendering and the execution of commands.

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  • 12 Votes
    47 Posts
    2k Views

    @dave1904 just coming back to this thread as @DownPW and I both experienced issues with other plugins today, and the fix was to use the plugin ordering in the ACP and move the Harmony theme to the very top so it comes before everything else in terms of other plugins.

    It might be worth at least trying this to see if it gives you a result rather than the previous bulldozer approach. Thinking about it, the previous fix I proposed is along the same lines and disabling plugins does in fact change the order when they are enabled again, so this is definitely worth a try.

    Let me know how you get on.

  • Rotating homepage icons, gifs?

    Solved Configure
    2
    3 Votes
    2 Posts
    195 Views

    @eveh It’s not a GIF, no. It’s actually a webp file so made much smaller, and uses keyframes to control the rotation on hover. You can easily make your own though 🙂

    The CSS for that is as below

    @keyframes rotate180 { from { transform: rotate(0deg); } to { transform: rotate(180deg); } } @keyframes rotate0 { from { transform: rotate(180deg); } to { transform: rotate(0deg); } }

    Your milage may vary on the CSS below, as it’s custom for Sudonix, but this is the class that is used to control the rotate

    .header .forum-logo, img.forum-logo.head { max-height: 50px; width: auto; height: 30px; margin-top: 9px; max-width: 150px; min-width: 32px; display: inline-block; animation-name: rotate180, rotate0; animation-duration: 1000ms; animation-delay: 0s, 1000ms; animation-iteration-count: 1; animation-timing-function: linear; transition: transform 1000ms ease-in-out; }
  • 9 Votes
    20 Posts
    912 Views

    @crazycells Yeah, looking at the plugin itself, that’s a hard coded limit

    3d6dbc10-185b-4102-9470-0c2731a10750-image.png

    I’ll probably remove that… eventually…

  • 0 Votes
    5 Posts
    393 Views

    @qwinter this particular site uses the code I wrote if you want to see it in action. It’s a information and intelligence gatherer I designed for collecting various information security articles from around the globe and consolidating them in one place.

    Essentially, each “post” is in fact generated by the script, and the NodeBB API.

    https://hostrisk.com/

  • 4 Votes
    12 Posts
    761 Views

    Placing this here for reference
    https://sudonix.com/topic/216/nodebb-js-script-css-theme-switcher

    Further information and posts can be found at this link

  • 3 Votes
    20 Posts
    984 Views

    @jac Exactly. Hard point to argue.

  • 7 Votes
    18 Posts
    1k Views

    @phenomlab thanks 🙂

  • WordPress & NodeBB

    Solved WordPress
    6
    0 Votes
    6 Posts
    524 Views

    @jac That won’t matter. You just redirect at nginx or apache level and it’ll work. The generally accepted standard though is to use a subdomain.