tl;dr — you can now find remote categories and see your tracked/watched categories in /world
.
A new alpha version of NodeBB was tagged today: v4.3.0-alpha.3. The biggest change is to the /world
route, which up until now showed a list of topics from outside of the local NodeBB instance.
New to this alpha release:
- A quick search widget was added, allowing you to directly search for remote categories. There is no need to navigate to to the search page to discover new categories.
- Your list of tracked and watched categories will show at the top of the page.
- "Tracking" and "Watching" categories—both local and remote—is how content discovery happens in NodeBB. Tracked categories will have new content show up in the "unread" page, while watched categories take that a step further and notify you when new content is posted.
- Tracking and watching a category will tell NodeBB to subscribe to that remote community for updates
At this time we're continuing to look for stability issues with the remote category integration. We'll be working on QoL fixes as we move into the beta phase this/next week.


Is it also possible to add remote communities to the main forum list? Or merge them into existing local categories?
Right now you're able to add remote categories to your world page. It's possible that we could allow admins to add remote categories to the forum index, although that'd be something we add later on.