Hey, remember Skype? I do. When I joined my first tech company (making silly little Facebook games back when that was a thing), they were coordinating over emails and in-person desk visits. First thing I did as an unpaid intern was move the dev team onto Skype.

We used it for so long we have some Skype emoji on this forum too :voodoo: :wave2: :mooning:

So long Skype, and thanks for all the fish.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/microsoft-is-shutting-down-skype-shifting-users-to-teams

We received word recently that one of our long-standing clients, NFC Ring, is planning to shut down their forum toward the end of the month. While this is normally a sad time, it's worth mentioning that NFC Ring has been hosting their forum with NodeBB for over ten years! They've been with us just about as long as our self-serve hosting service has been, along with all of our ups and downs over the years.

Their forum contained a couple custom integrations, along with the earliest known NodeBB SSO plugin, and had a custom theme at one point as well.

These innovators envisioned the idea of paying for groceries with the tap of a ring years before that technology became ubiquitous. Super cool.

Nevertheless, their trust in us (a dinky little company in 2013) did not go unnoticed, and we wish them the best!

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I discovered this week a little footgun if you happen to use this bit of syntactic sugar:

``` const object = { foo: 'bar', }

switch (true) { case object && object.foo: { // This will never execute }

default: // ... } ```

The cases in your switch(true) must actually return true, not truthy, for the case to execute.

Using switch(true) is a bit of a controversial coding practice, since it's only meant to replace long if..else if..else chains. Literally has no additional utility except aesthetics... but I like it nevertheless :joy_cat:

We were contacted recently with a client request to migrate a forum into NodeBB and launch to a large audience very very rapidly.

Naturally, we said yes.

The client's team did the migration using the Write API, and handed over a MongoDB import for us to import. They also built a brand new theme from scratch.

With the forum migrated and deployed, they launched today with a staggered release: an email blast followed by a 6pm Instagram push.

This is what that looked like :grimacing:

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With a large client like this we'd typically opt for a scaled setup with a load balancer, but we wanted to see how far we could push a single NodeBB installation. At 2pm we ran into the limitations of a single vCPU and doubled the resources. In the end we were able to handle the largest load (the 6pm Instagram launch) with 4 vCPUs on a virtual private server with 8GB RAM.

What kind of load were we seeing by the end? Our records indicate a peak of 83k page views/hr spread across 21k unique IP addresses.

Are you a fan of Jon Bellion? Check out their forum: https://beautifulmind.club/

Shall I ask them to federate their forum? :smiling_imp:

In another thread, @puppygirlhornypost2@transfem.social talks about challenges regarding proliferation of spam (or other unwanted content) on the fediverse:

> ... I was talking about reddit's "posts require approval" mode. Something that might be of use for new accounts registering on pixelfed instances to prevent things like gorespam from occurring.

NodeBB has the post queue (our name for it), and it works really well to stop drive-by spammers. Most cheap spam is easily identified as such, and it's only a couple clicks to send them to /dev/null.

More recently, and especially since we've been federating posts outward, we've started encountering possibly LLM generated content entering our post queue. It could be that these accounts are legitimate users creating an account to respond to remote content, but it's equally likely that they're attempting to create plausible content in order to pass validation, before proceeding to post spam.

At least here on community.nodebb.org it's trivial to discover, because this forum is for NodeBB support/discussion, and a post out of the blue responding to a post about Trump or Israel/Palestine is very obviously not meant to be on this forum, although it's definitely one of those "hard problems" for more general instances.