Forums are about community conversation — mostly. Sometimes you need to talk one-on-one or in a small group, which is why NodeBB includes a chat feature. With our latest release we’ve improved the look-and-feel of our chats for both desktop and mobile views.
1.8.0 also brings changes to the way privileges and moderation capabilities are allocated. Admins can now control global privileges for image and file upload as well as chat from the Manage > Privileges menu. And managing both global and category moderators can now be handled on the single Manage > Admins & Mods menu, rather than via each category management page. And speaking of uploaded files, these can now also be easily managed via Manage > Uploads.
If you are running a private forum that you wish to hide from search engines, this will now also be easier. Web crawlers (spiders) are now a system group called “spiders”, so you can disallow search engines from crawling certain categories if desired.
We’ve also updated the Daily Digest algorithm to always show a selection of topics, so your users will hear from you more frequently even if your forum is relatively quiet.
There are also minor security issues addressed in v1.8.0, so if you are running NodeBB on your own server please be sure to update.