NodeBB 0.9.0 Has Dropped
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The latest series of NodeBB is now available. We will be looking into updating to it over the weekend. Not going to upgrade tonight in case issues are found.
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We are told that avatars have been completely messed up in the 0.9.0 move, so we are testing on Gamrhaus to figure out how bad this is going to be.
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There is a script in the upgrade process that's sole purpose is to break our avatar functionality. This is problematic on its own. But it turns out that that script is not working and we can't upgrade because of it. So at this time we are not looking at 0.9.0, it's not looking viable until a lot more work goes into it and the NodeBB team determines how to handle the process of downgrading functionality.
So sorry gang, we are on indefinite hold on this one while they figure out their gameplan, roadmap and what they an intending to do.
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This is what we just posted to NodeBB on their forums:
Very sad about the loss of functionality here. This is dramatic enough that we are concerned about moving forward with the 0.9.0 release - as we had provided feedback previously. It's concerning not only that functionality is moving backwards (the 0.9.0 release is actually looking worse then 0.8.2 for us) and losing ground, but the through process behind breaking the existing releases instead of providing a smooth, option upgrade path. Moving functionality to plugins has left feature after feature in the dust, or halfway broken. We are literally working with less functionality than we had a year ago and that it is intentional decision making to not moving the product forward is incredibly concerning. I do not understand why these decisions are made or what the plan is for the product. By the time that 1.0 releases, what will be left to release.
We appreciate the security concerns with gravatar but frankly, that a BS excuse for someone's pet desire to remove it. That's not a "we are making serious software and supporting our customers" decision. We rely on that functionality and saying it will go to a plugin is crap as has been covered before. Just like the image links that vanished, YouTube embedding that has been broken for forever and buggy mobile experience that no one addresses. Development time is being spent crippling what was solved instead of fixing what is wrong or providing new features.
There is logic, customer-centric ways to dealing with Gravatar if security concern was in any way the reason for the decision - like disabling it by default or providing some controls from the site managers. Doing this is something wholly different and isn't how I see quality software being maintained. We need to know that when we commit to NodeBB that NodeBB is going to commit to us. It's not trivial to choose a platform and if that platform is unstable and the developers don't understand how production environments work... that just doesn't fly.
Sure the code is open source and we are free to fork it and go our own way. We aren't looking for a product where we have to develop it ourselves, we would have done that from the beginning if that is what we wanted to have to do.
Now, not only are we being mocked with "removing core functionality" as if it somehow was to the benefit of the customers, but as an additional slap in the face the BS code that takes our existing Gravatar functionality away breaks the upgrade process so we can't even move to 0.9.0 on our test platforms to see how bad the step backwards is going to be.
And all of this after we expressed these concerns and trusted NodeBB to take rational, customer-focused steps to not act like this months ago. We are not happy in the slightest. We've committed nearly two years to this platform and consistently see it slipping more and more into excuses and less and less into being production viable.
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Some of the things that have moved backwards over the past year or so:
- Imgur posting was broken for a bit, it's back now but was unreliable and inconsistent.
- Video embedding used to work beautifully now it is only marginally functional. It plays videos but they are tiny and don't fill their embedded space.
- Mobile experience is garbage. You can't do what we could do last summer (15 months ago!) Huge steps backwards there.
- Getting to bottom of thread is impossible.
- Dismissing pointless alerts is next to impossible.
- Screen is full of pointless alerts that we don't need.
- Posting requires just "knowing" tricks as the mobile editor jumps around, does blind things, isn't stable, etc.
- Search was mildly functional a year ago, now it is completely useless. We have to search via Google. Adding keywords makes search worse rather than filtering results. Results come as "least useful" rather than "best match."
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What happened to categories? there's no water cooler now everything is in one place.
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@Jason said:
What happened to categories? there's no water cooler now everything is in one place.
It's still there. You just select it while posting. That was a day or two ago. Nothing to do with updates.
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We also have a GitHub bug reported for the NodeBB Upgrade...
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Videos are still borked in 0.9.0
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@scottalanmiller said:
While I don't mind the landing page being the recent postings list, but Mango icon should take us to the list of groups. The lack of that shortcut seems more like a hindrance than not. I wasn't expecting the Mango shortcut to change when I voted to change the landing page.
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
While I don't mind the landing page being the recent postings list, but Mango icon should take us to the list of groups. The lack of that shortcut seems more like a hindrance than not. I wasn't expecting the Mango shortcut to change when I voted to change the landing page.
It didn't, it's always been a link to the landing page. It would be really weird if the home page and the link to the home page went different places.
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Did you check the categories button to see where that goes?
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@scottalanmiller said:
Did you check the categories button to see where that goes?
I just read about it.. so that solves my concern.
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It is going to break some stuff but things are slow and our platform has been updated. We are making the leap up to NodeBB 0.9.0. Hold on, here we go.
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nice new reply notification..
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but wtf is this... it appears on the right top corner of a new post/reply then fades out
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That, from what we could tell (and how the heck did you manage to get a screen cap of it!!) it is an "unread post" indicator so that you can tell which posts ML thinks that you have or have not seen.
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@scottalanmiller said:
That, from what we could tell (and how the heck did you manage to get a screen cap of it!!) it is an "unread post" indicator so that you can tell which posts ML thinks that you have or have not seen.
greenshot ftw.. it "pauses" your screen when you hit the button.
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@JaredBusch said:
@scottalanmiller said:
That, from what we could tell (and how the heck did you manage to get a screen cap of it!!) it is an "unread post" indicator so that you can tell which posts ML thinks that you have or have not seen.
greenshot ftw.. it "pauses" your screen when you hit the button.
Mine doesn't. Often takes up to 30 seconds for it to react and if I do anything I'll end up off of the screen that I was on. Sometimes I forget about it and it pops up for me when I'm doing something completely different. So yours is really fast? Mine varies a lot, but is never exactly instant but probably two seconds when fast, thirty on average and has certainly had times where it was two to five minutes - enough that I was quite surprised when it popped up and had no idea why I had originally hit it.
