Welcome to the home of the Nodesforum

the Nodesforum is a free PHP forum script

Get the source code on GitHub:
Visit the Nodesforum GitHub Repository
Download, contribute, or report issues on GitHub.
or or

Features:

integrates into your site:

  • can work with the already existing user system of your site

    the Nodesforum is able to work with the already existing user system of your website or summon its own according to your needs. This way visitors will not need to register to register 2 times to be able to use your site and your forum also this way the forum will be helping your main site getting more registrants.

  • can be included in a page of your site

    while it is possible to access the Nodesforum on your server simply by browsing to the URL of the folder in which you placed the forum files on your server, the Nodesforum is built so that you can include it to a page of your site using the php include() function, this way you can have your header/footer/page borders around your forum so that it really merges with the rest of your site and offers intuitive navigation to your users.

  • fully customizable colors

    Every color in the Nodesforum (all backgrounds and all types of text (normal text, links, different states of links...)) can be fully customized from the config.php file so that you can give the forum exactly the same colors than what you have used on the rest of your site to make the forum look like its really part of your brand. Everything in the forum is based on 8 colors of your choice and the colors can be specified in any way that is supported by CSS.

powerful bbcode:

the bbcode of the Nodesforum is divided in 3 sections:

  • the standard bbcode tags

    is a complete set of tags including colors, tables with background colors, links, picture embedding, infinite nested lists ect which is available to all posters.

  • the 3rd party bbcode tags

    contains tags to embed content from various 3rd party sites such as youtube, zshare, google maps and lot more. the limit of how many of each third party tag can be posted by users or guests can be edited by the moderators of the 3rd party tags. also more 3rd party sites will be regularily added to the list and you can easily get the new ones by updating your bbcode.php on your forum

  • the risky bbcode tags

    contains the tags to embed flash, iframes and include HTML to posts. these tags allow ppl with the power to use them to add just about anything in their posts, even javascript, any ad code, any widget... the power of using each of these tags is initially only given to the main mod of the forum, then this one can distribute it or can also distribute the power of giving the power itself.

bbcode legend

complex moderator hierarchy

each folder or post can have its own set of mods. a moderator on a folder is also moderator on all its children folder and posts. each moderator has a level and can make or remove moderator powers of moderators of lesser level than him/her.

whenever a user creates a folder or a post the user automatically gets moderator power on that element, allowing anyone to create subforums anywhere in the depths of your forum.

moderators can ban a user or an ip address from a folder that they have control over or any of its children. a user or ip banned from a folder will also be banned in all its children folder

people who have moderator powers over the root folder will be moderator in the entire forum, also ppl banned on the root will be banned from the entire forum

also i think it is interesting to mention that it is possible to view or erase all the posts from a certain user or a certain ip inside of any folder and its childen; the procedure to get rid of all the posts from a user or an ip from a folder and its children is 1 simple operation that can also be undone and redone at will.

the forum is designed like an operating system

you can make infinitly complex subfolder structures. you can also move folders or posts from a location to another bringing along their content. you can delete and you can also restore deleted folders or posts. you chose in the config how long deleted folders or posts stay available for restoration, the default is 1 year, after that they are really deleted to save db space.

advanced privacy

the email addresses and passwords saved in the database are all encrypted with AES. AES is a very strong encryption. when a text is encryted with AES, the same text is also used as encryption key, which causes the encryption to be 1 way (crypting always gives the same result, good for comparing, but cannot be decrypted). if the database is ever compromised, these informations will be indecipherable to the hacker, so he/she will not be able to get anyones password or emails, just jibberish.

you email address is not either saved in your cookies even if you use the "remember me" option when you login, only a 2way encrypted version of it, the key to decrypt it is stored only in the database, so to get your email from the "remember me" cookie, a hacker would need to compromise both the database and your computer...

to allow moderators to ban certain ip addresses, the ip addresses of the posters are recorded with every post. but to protect the privacy of this information, the ip addresses are recorded in the database using one of the encryptions available to php, it is up to the admin of the forum to chose which encryption to use in the conifg but the default is sha512 which is powerful and undecryptable today. also the ip addresses saved with each posts are automatically erased after a certain time chosen in the config, the default is 2 years.

detailed log

any modification to anything, any moderator nomination, ip/user banning is logged into the "mods_log". in the mods_log you can add/remove criterias to view only actions on a certain post, from a certain user, of a certain type, ect and combine these criterias as you wish to allow you to see the specific logs of anything.

this allows anyone with the power on a certain location to be able to look at everything that has been done in his/her jurisdiction and anything done can always be undone by someone with sufficient privileges.

trustable quotes

have you ever noticed that on other forums when you quote someone you can change the text inside of the quote to make it look like theyre saying stupid things?

well, the Nodesforum has a cure for that. Not only the Nodesforum quote tag has a loose "source" attribute that you can use to loosely quote "your grandmother" or "the president", but the Nodesforum quote tag also has a strict attribute that you can use to quote what other posters have said on the forum.

when you click the quote button next to a post, it automatically builds a strict quote for you, you can also add more strict quotes to your post by using the button for it in the post edition menu.

strict quotes are validated by the system when you post and the system will only accept your post if all your strict quotes are true.

also as a side note, the powerful Nodesforum quote system can allow infinite nested quotes. this means that you can quote someone quoting someone else and so on...

the standard bbcode tags are also rendered inside of quotes to preserve the posts integrity, but the 3rd party and risky tags are not rendered in the quotes to avoid repetition of heavy content.

non-conflicting in multiplicity

you can install multiple instances of the Nodesforum on the same domain name/database without having any conflict in your database or in your cookie or session variable names.

the config file of the Nodesforum asks you to chose a unique word to differenciate each of your forum installs, this word will be added at the beginning of the name of every database table or cookie and session variable name used by the forum.

this feature will also allow you to install the future updates of the forum as separate forums so that you can freely test the new version before going live without interrupting the service of your old forum in the meantime. the automatic database installer that runs after you have installed the forum on your server is able to clone the tables of another forum instead of starting blank to allow you to update in this manner.

encourages discussion:

Have you ever been searching the web for something and then you find ppl talking about your question on some forum and you would really like to post a very interesting comment but you dont feel like going through an entire registration process so you just forget about it?

the Nodesforum allows visitors who are not logged in to reply on posts but they must also enter a captcha to keep the spam-bots away. this feature can also be disabled on the whole forum or on each post individually.

A Lot More!!

there are a lot more features to the Nodesforum but this page is getting long enough, why dont you checkout the Demo and try posting a few posts and see for yourself...