đź’¬ We want to hear from you regarding the Netbird forum!

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Hi everyone!

Now that the Netbird Community Forum has been live for a little while and discussions are starting to grow, we’d love to take a moment to check in with you! The community.

This forum exists to help Netbird users connect, solve problems, share setups, and learn from each other. Since many of you have already been browsing topics, asking questions, or helping others, your feedback is incredibly valuable in shaping where the forum goes next.

:compass: Has the Forum Helped You?

We’re curious to hear about your experience so far.

  • Have you found solutions to issues here?
  • Did a post or guide help you with your Netbird setup?
  • Have you discovered new features or ideas through other users?
  • Is there something you were hoping to find but couldn’t?

Even small bits of feedback help us understand what’s working well and what the forum could improve on.

:hammer_and_wrench: Help Us Improve the Forum

We’re always looking for ways to make the forum more useful and easier to navigate. Let us know things like:

  • Categories that might be missing
  • Features that would improve discussions
  • Documentation or guides you’d like to see
  • Anything that could make the community experience better

Your suggestions directly influence how the forum evolves.

One example of improvement that has been recently implemented is the increase of more attachments for new users:
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:handshake: Interested in Helping the Community?

As the forum continues to grow, we’re also looking for community members who enjoy helping others .

If you:

  • Have experience with Netbird setups
  • Like troubleshooting networking issues
  • Enjoy answering questions or sharing knowledge
  • Want to help make the community welcoming and helpful

…then we’d love to hear from you!

Community volunteers can help by:

  • Answering user questions
  • Writing helpful guides
  • Sharing best practices
  • Keeping discussions constructive and friendly

If this sounds like something you’d enjoy, feel free to reply here or reach out via DM to @Xeravax .

:left_speech_bubble: Tell Us Your Thoughts

Reply below and let us know:

  • How has the forum been for you so far?
  • Has it helped you with Netbird in any way?
  • What could make it better?
  • Would you be interested in helping others here?

Your feedback will help guide the future of the Netbird Community Forum .

Thanks again for being part of the community! We appreciate everyone who contributes, asks questions, or helps others along the way. :rocket:

Looking forward to hearing from you all!

  • The Netbird Community Team :dove:
2

I was not pleased to see that you forbid signing up with email and password.

3

This is due to the perspective of staff where a choice was made to not allow local accounts for the saftey of those aformentioned accounts. Meaning there are no passwords bound to the accounts themselves, removing a “risk” off-of the forum.

I’ve asked a few times for the staff to update this instance (as I cannot) but have yet to recieve confirmation of the update. Especially because it would allow use of the following IDP:
https://id.discourse.com/

4

I am rather new to Netbird, and my knowledge of Linux is low to medium. With your help, I have found answers to a couple of my questions. I have had my own forums for 15 years, so the feedback I give here is based on my experience.

  • I would recommend making it clearer that users should not post topics related to support or problems in the general discussions. Alternatively, you could use red text to clearly indicate that users should go to the related category and post their topic there when they need support. This is a mistake I made when I first started.

  • I fully respect the Netbird team’s choice of Discourse, but personally, I find WoltLab to be a much more reliable option. It is also open source, although it is commercial software. Of course, it could just be my personal preference, but something like THIS is much cleaner and easier for users to read. With their hosted option, you shouldn’t worry about user account security.

  • I highly recommend creating a section in your documentation for FAQs. You could update it monthly, which would decrease your support burden significantly. I recommend posting each topic/question on a separate page so it can be better indexed by Google and found more easily.

All the best

1 Like
5

Gee, thanks for making the decision for me. :roll_eyes:

Local accounts with modern password hashing are already secure, so disabling them doesn’t meaningfully improve security – it mainly forces users to rely on external providers like Google.

6

When applicable, or specific tordwards the support quotes. I try to move them down to their support page. But with me being the (current) only CSA (Community Support Agent) and managing the forum voulentarily. This is something done on a assistance by assistance basis, the staff checks the forum occasionally. But mostly either when I ask them for their input where it’s needed or when they see a specific issue that has to do with a bug or similair.

That’s a NB Team thing, I have no control over the FAQ or their docs apart from PR’s on their website repo.

This was actually my suggestion, while something like WoltLab could be great. It’s commercial, so it has an additional pricing on top of itself. It makes me feel like I’m working with or working on XenForo, obviously, that is not an issue in it of itself. But it’s so much more complicated for a simple “awnser and response” forum that Discourse is. And it’s used across the board by a ton of companies, so it’s quality software. Even if it’s just open source.

7

I understand the concern. However, this isn’t a decision I made personally.
The platform owners (NB) have chosen to minimize the amount of authentication-related data stored in Discourse. Because of that policy, local accounts are disabled and authentication goes through those providers. As the forum administrator I manage the platform, but decisions about authentication policy come from NB. If their stance changes in the future, we can certainly change it, but for now this is the configuration the forum is running with.

8

I am relatively new to Netbird but an experienced OpenWRT user so familiar with the Discourse system so that works for me.
I did not need the forum to setup as OpenWRT has its own support forum but it is good that this forum is available.
So keep up the good work

9

Discourse ID has been added in case you are interested.

10

My feedback:

I appreciate the existence of a forum. I joined the forum especially to be able to contact developers outside the frame of issues to be able to ask general, more conceptual question which IMHO are not good candidates for an issue. Also, possible answers would likely be useful to be documented more permanent than in an issue.

Also, the responsiveness of the developers in issues was not that well. So forum was another try.

I’m also willing to give back my experience in the forum, though most questions are that detailed, that I’m not able to help, because underlying concepts are complex or not documented.

I realized over time, that the forum is (abviously) not a direct channel to developers, so we are more or less on our own. This is not bad, but will not answer my questions ;-). I think, that forum just does not have the critical mass, that is necessary to work on its own. So we should not be sad, angry or similar. People on the forum do their best. Let us try to let the community grow :slight_smile: