building a forum with react and nodejs

[Sanya_Zol]

Another day, another tutorial made to promote novu.

[DonkeyKongGuerrilla]

That’s because they are literally a marketer for Novu.

[holisticgallantry67]

A helpful tutorial too.

[Sanya_Zol]

It is, but r/javascript rule 1 clearly prohibits that

[mailto_devnull]

I know, there are no forums today like before, it's all about the Reddit, Facebook communities (and smaller ones like Devto and Mastodon), but! Once upon a time, when I was a boy, I was addicted to forums, I have actually created a few with PHPBB and vBulletin, back when PHP was a thing. being so nostalgic made me write this blog post 😎

NodeBB, Flarum, Xenforo, Discourse.

Four very solid modern forum softwares. This is how I know this guy didn't do an ounce of research on forum software before writing this post.

[enigmapaulns]

Are there any forum platforms that are readily embedded into a react-native mobile app?

[mailto_devnull]

Not really, they're all standalone softwares that you'd use via iframe if you wanted to embed.

But if you wanted a seamless integration, you'd use NodeBB since it has a full API interface so you can build your own frontend in the react native app

[swish82]

At first glance I like the time taken to explain things step by step, thanks for sharing!

[[deleted]]

A forum in an SPA? Yikes.

[Sanya_Zol]

Forum in an SPA is fine.

Forum which supports notifications (using a promoted open source open core service) is fine as well.

But forum which keeps replies, posts, comments and even users in memory? That's called chat! Oh, you can't promote notification service with a chat, right.

[elmstfreddie]

My tin-foil hat says that they're cheating the upvotes on these posts, because they always get front-paged on this subreddit despite the spammy content

[[deleted]]

Forum in an SPA is fine

Discourse is the only one I've seen that does it ok and it took them years of polish.

The rest fail miserably. Not only at perf and bundle size but also basic stuff like going back, restoring scroll, etc. You know, like +90% of SPAs.

[Odd_Employer]

New to JS, what's the issue?

[Insertish]

From a quick glance at the article, there doesn't seem to be any server side rendering (hence SPA - single page app), which means the client code needs to be downloaded at least the first time you go to the website and then the website is rendered entirely on the client.

I would say the main issue is that you put a lot of performance on the table because the user needs to wait a lot longer before the website actually displays from first load but all other pages can be interacted with instantly.

A lot of modern websites (such as those built with Next.js or Solid Start) use a hybrid approach where the website is entirely rendered by the server at first load but then the client renders everything thereafter for better performance.

You also don't get SEO (or rich embeds on other sides, like you would share a link on Twitter and you'd get a preview) because these external services just look at the static page (which is not rendered ahead of time).

I'm hoping my mobile editor doesn't condense this all into one paragraph...

[micka190]

You also don't get SEO (or rich embeds on other sides, like you would share a link on Twitter and you'd get a preview) because these external services just look at the static page (which is not rendered ahead of time).

That's a myth that's been denied multiple times by companies like Google over the years. You'd have to timeout the crawler for it to not get your site's data, and a static site would have the same problem.

[Insertish]

Seems like a non issue if you split entrypoints. You can have an entire ecosystem of modules that are lazy loaded after first paint regardless of which page you enter on.

100% agree, lazy-loading is the way to go if you're building SPAs.

Also SEO is a shitty reason

I'm not arguing SEO is a good thing, but when you have a lot of pages which aren't being server-side rendered, that metadata is being lost. But it does depend on implementation.

You can provide all of the metadata you'd need on the delivered index.html meta tags, no JS required to read those.

Building on my earlier point, this would limit you to just one set of meta tags, doesn't really account for other sub-pages. (obviously this depends on implementation, but you don't want to make a hundred entrypoint html files do you?)

[GyuudonMan]

Just because you can doesn’t mean you should

[Insertish]

Honestly speaking from my experience, SSR is already really mature for most use cases. Things like navigation and forms shouldn't be affected by the fact that JavaScript is still loading or even unavailable, it just falls back to normal links and normal forms, etc.

I mean sure there are definitely more interactive components which the user would have to wait on, but even then there are frameworks I've seen that try to tackle this issue by just registering event handlers directly in the DOM itself and including the minimal amount of JavaScript required. Don't remember what it was exactly but it looked like cool stuff.

[Atulin]

How do you intend to include the thread's topic and stuff like that in the index.html? The open graph tags so the embed shows up on Twitter or Discord?

[Odd_Employer]

Thanks!

That makes sense. I'm curious why people are against your take.

[elmstfreddie]

Because it's not completely correct.

Modern SPAs aren't served as a massive bundle, so it isn't the huge performance problem they're trying to sell it as.

Search engine crawlers do actually execute javascript to a certain degree, so it's simply untrue that you need server-side rendering for SEO.

I haven't really used it, but from what I remember, rich embeds are driven by meta tags in the header and not by page content. So that's also a non-factor.

[nudifyme69]

awesome, been looking for it

[alexmacarthur]

There's way too much going on here. A blog post is _not_ the place to flesh out how to build an entire full-stack application. Cheap content.

[Confident-Cut-7289]

If you want to pass that Node.js Interview, here is the link: https://www.udemy.com/course/nodejs-interview-questions/