I know that you have all begun to notice some weirdness with this forum. Posts have gone missing. Adjusted without notice. On our end, we don’t know precisely what is happening.
What we do know is that nodeBB is old and not getting updated. We have talked about switching to another code base, but that runs the risk of losing what data we have already. But it may be necessary.
So, I am open to suggestions. If anyone has experience with a different, modern, updated system to use, I’m all eyes.
“It is better to live doing the things that you like. It is foolish to live within this dream of a world seeing unpleasantness and doing only things that you do not like.” -- Yamamoto Tsunetomo.
@ganymede Is it not getting updated? It seems to have recent releases on its GitHub
When I last discussed things with Arkandel, that was the impression I got. Regardless, we know how good I am with the code for this forum. I may be a decent moderator, but I am the worst when it comes to its tech issues.
Of course, like, if you want to help us maintain the DB from the back-end, like, this is totally the time when I would encourage you (because I know you are better at tech-stuff) to DM me so I can beg and plead for your assistance.
“It is better to live doing the things that you like. It is foolish to live within this dream of a world seeing unpleasantness and doing only things that you do not like.” -- Yamamoto Tsunetomo.
In just a quick perusal of forum software in the vein of NodeBB, it seems that Discourse is really popular. DigitalOcean even appears to be able to set you up a droplet automatically, and it has a one-button update feature for the tech illiterate.
Might be worth looking into.
Racism isn't Tinkerbell. It doesn't need you to believe in it for it to exist.
@derp There does also seem to be some utility available to import a nodeBB board over to Discourse. Probably for the tech crew than us schmucks, though.
He/Him
@tinuviel said in Forum wonk:
@derp There does also seem to be some utility available to import a nodeBB board over to Discourse. Probably for the tech crew than us schmucks, though.
There are step by step instructions for that here. It doesn't look that complicated. Likely doable.
@ganymede Generally we are one version behind. In fact I should probably update to the newest version soon.
The first issue with nodeBB is sometimes the updater doesn't work and I spend hours fiddling with it until the forum comes back up. And the concern is always that if I can't then I might need to downgrade or set up the whole thing from scratch, resulting in downtime.
The real issue though is there's a memory leak... somewhere. Although the specs for the VM I got MSB running on are pretty generous, this thing eats memory. Eventually it craps out and I need to manually restart it.
The ideal solution is that someone with more time than I do wants to take over the task of supporting MSN on a technical level. I'd then pass over the credentials and they can take care of it going forward. But such a person hasn't stepped up.
Another solution is to get more hardware. It'd cost more though (double) which at some point will be a burden on me. It'd also not remove the leak issue, just mask or make it happen more irregularly.
A third approach would be to migrate to a different platform. However there are definite downsides to that, too; for starters it might have other, new, exciting problems of its own. 
The other is that we'd almost certainly lose all the existing post going back years, and that's definitely not ideal, unless there's a migration script that will work.
As a side note I do take nightly rotating backups of the whole site so there's never a time we don't have 14 days' of rollback. Those are kept both on-site and on a separate host I run at home. But even this mitigates, it doesn't remove risk.
The short of it is... if someone wants to support MSB technically I'd love it.
Are you running it on one of your own VMs, or like a DO droplet? DO is a good option for stuff like this. It's relatively cheap. You'd probably end up paying about ten bucks a month? Maybe twelve if you want backups. A number of us are doing that already for Ares stuff, and so far it works very nicely.
Or, not even necessarily you. Just anyone ya'll end up trusting to keep the lights on I guess.
Racism isn't Tinkerbell. It doesn't need you to believe in it for it to exist.
@derp It's running on a linode VM.
It could run anywhere. I just wouldn't want to be in charge of migrating it - although I'd be happy to help.
FWIW, I have a deep loathing for Discourse due to the way it does away with the notion of individual pages for forum threads, and in support of that, breaks browser-based ctrl-f in favor of using their terrible built in search. Might not be that big of a deal for here, but it's a huge pain in the ass when you're trying to track down something on a technical oriented forum that uses Discourse.
@sixregrets said in Forum wonk:
Might not be that big of a deal for here, but it's a huge pain in the ass when you're trying to track down something on a technical oriented forum that uses Discourse.
I concur.
I don't really consider us a technical-oriented forum.
Unless it comes to cat GIFs and food.
@sixregrets said in Forum wonk:
FWIW, I have a deep loathing for Discourse due to the way it does away with the notion of individual pages for forum threads, and in support of that, breaks browser-based ctrl-f in favor of using their terrible built in search. Might not be that big of a deal for here, but it's a huge pain in the ass when you're trying to track down something on a technical oriented forum that uses Discourse.
You tried using the search here?
Just saying...
Racism isn't Tinkerbell. It doesn't need you to believe in it for it to exist.
@derp Not really, but it seems like most of the posts these days happen in the same few long running threads, which probably don't do nodeBB any favors. I can't imagine that trying to find something in the Arx threads is any more difficult than it is on Discourse, but given that they don't show up on the recent activity page anymore, there's bound to be some special jank going on.
@sixregrets said in Forum wonk:
FWIW, I have a deep loathing for Discourse due to the way it does away with the notion of individual pages for forum threads
What do you mean? I can go to an individual page for a long-running forum thread in Discoure on the Ares forum.
Example: https://forum.aresmush.com/t/minor-nuisances
I like Discourse.
I looked into the node -> discourse migration the last time I talked to Gany about forum foo, and there were some issues with it. I can't remember the details - something about the way the data model maps or something? I was left with the impression that it would be a ton of work and possibly flakey to migrate.
This was, admittedly, quite awhile ago. Maybe there's a better version now.
@faraday said in Forum wonk:
What do you mean? I can go to an individual page for a long-running forum thread in Discoure on the Ares forum.
I was referring to a particular page in a thread, not a 'web page'. Conventional forums having 20 or 40 posts per page in a given thread, for example. I don't believe that Discourse separates posts into separate pages for display.
@sixregrets said in Forum wonk:
@faraday said in Forum wonk:
What do you mean? I can go to an individual page for a long-running forum thread in Discoure on the Ares forum.
I was referring to a particular page in a thread, not a 'web page'. Conventional forums having 20 or 40 posts per page in a given thread, for example. I don't believe that Discourse separates posts into separate pages for display.
I honestly forgot this forum offers that option, as I never use it.
He/Him
Another option could be to migrate the redis database MSB currently runs from to mongoDB.
I am not sure why redis was chosen in the first place - I suspect it's because it is very fast, albeit also very memory hungry, but when MSB launched it simply didn't need to worry about that. As we progressively add more threads and content that's becoming an issue.
However nodeBB's solution for a migration costs something like $500 which is a no-go. However someone determined could do that as a custom solution.
It's probably cheaper to just find a hosting company that gives more RAM than Linode for a comparable package. Atm we have 4GB which isn't ideal, and much more CPU/disk than we're utilizing.
Do we need to start a Patreon? A fundraiser? I can chip in a bit towards that $500.
Ceterum autem censeo Carthaginem esse delendam
@ominous That'd be up to Gany. But I think it's better (and cheaper, and more reliable) to increase the VM's specs.
@arkandel I don't think you're going to find better than linode's pricing for a high-memory droplet.
Redis is probably the reason that you need so much RAM. Using it as a cache layer to speed things up makes sense, but using it as a primary data source for a forum of this size seems non-ideal.
@faraday said in Forum wonk:
What do you mean? I can go to an individual page for a long-running forum thread in Discoure on the Ares forum.
I was referring to a particular page in a thread, not a 'web page'. Conventional forums having 20 or 40 posts per page in a given thread, for example. I don't believe that Discourse separates posts into separate pages for display.
