So really what I'm missing currently is an internal ticket system. A place where someone can press a button and then privately reach out to staff in order to raise an issue. This mostly impacts gaming communities I think as it has been raised in the past here once. We have a contact form on the forum now but it really is no replacement for an instant messaging ticket system. I'd rather avoid third-party options not only for privacy and security but primarily so that it is integrated into our current platform.

But this is just one of many issues that will need to be overcome in the near future. Moving away from discord is incredibly difficult. Not only is it free but it has fantastic support for setting up and maintaining your community. It's meant for this purpose and it does it really well.

As I mentioned there was a deprecated plugin for this. This plugin allowed you to create a category where the posts could only be viewed by the author and authorised groups. This would have been a perfectly viable solution however it is over a decade old now.

(nodebb-plugin-support-forum is the name of the plugin)

@hemiechinuss ah! You're talking about nodebb-plugin-support-forum!

If you're interested in that plugin I'm sure I can get it updated for v4. You're right in that that would be helpful from a moderation standpoint.

When you say...

@hemiechinuss said:

it has fantastic support for setting up and maintaining your community

What was there for community admins, good documentation? Onboarding support? One on one contact point?

I'd want to make some inroads into providing something like this for NodeBB admins as well.

Yes, that's the one. I would love for that to still be supported. It would meet my needs perfectly.

@julian said:

What was there for community admins, good documentation? Onboarding support? One on one contact point?

The documentation was ok, it was decent enough if you wanted to create your own bots and webhooks. They did onboarding well. Agreeing to rules, prompting new users to visit a spot and post there, etc.

For community admin it doesn't really offer much more than NodeBB other than being more flexible in its capacity to service more types of community. Permissions is definitely a sore spot with NodeBB. They work, but they don't work as well as on Discord where I can lock a channel to a group or even an individual and the sheer amount of permissions I can define per group or individual makes it incredibly flexible.

One-on-one contact points were definitely a plus. Allowing individual users permissions to specific channels and threads was a really useful feature that I used a lot.

While it does lean on bots and webhooks for functionality, it is really easy to set up whatever you need on Discord and there are significantly less plugins on NodeBB that offer the same functionality that the various bots provide over on Discord. What I think is the biggest sore spot here is automation. Discord had a lot of that.

To be fair though I've only been using NodeBB this last week and I am only scratching the surface of what it can do. I'm really new to this specific forum software.