NodeBB v4.7.0 — category boost fixes, remote media/emoji in chats, and more!

[julian@community.nodebb.org]

Hope everybody is having a great autumn — with temperatures slated to drop next week, I suppose it’s almost time for winter 🥶

(and yes, I use em dashes. No LLM was used to write this travesty of a release post.)

We’ve just dropped NodeBB v4.7.0 with some nice QoL improvements for sites federating via ActivityPub.

Security Fixes

Just a note that v4.6.3 contained a dependency upgrade to the validator package that fixes CVE-2025-56200. v4.7.0 contains this fix as well.

New setting to control whether uploaded media is displayed as a topic thumbnail ️

Early changes to better handle ActivityPub content meant that uploaded post content was shown in the topic thumbnails set. This is now a configurable option in Settings > Uploads.

Removal of the “federated description”

We had a small postscript added by default when categories federated outward, and it even came with some default text about mentioning the category to create a topic. It didn’t quite work out like we planned, and just looked plain weird when viewed through other threadiverse software (you don’t mention a community to create a post in it).

For now I’ve removed that feature.

A link back to remote categories ️

Remote categories now have a button that allows you to navigate directly to the community itself — be it a Lemmy or Piefed community, Peertube channel, etc.

Category boost fixes

When a topic is moved between categories, the related categories will share (or “Announce” in AP parlance) OP. Likewise, it will be unshared by the other category is no longer belongs to.

N.B. For devs — categories will also federate out Move and Remove activities for the appropriate contexts, which is going to be part of an upcoming FEP the ForumWG is working on.

Improved handling of remote content in chats

When receiving non-public content from remote sources (shown as a chat message), embedded images are now included.

When sending chat messages outside of NodeBB, emoji are now included.