NodeBB Global Chat Search

Standard chat search in NodeBB works well when you already know which room the message is in. But sometimes you remember the message — not the chat.

NodeBB Global Chat Search solves this by adding a global search bar to the chat sidebar, allowing you to search across all conversations you have ever participated in.

🚀 Features

Global Context
Searches across all room IDs associated with your user account.

Indexed Search When Available
The plugin first asks NodeBB's filter:messaging.searchMessages hook — the same hook that powers core's in-room message search — so an installed search plugin such as nodebb-plugin-dbsearch answers from its index instead of the plugin reading every message. Index hits are still re-checked against room membership, the private-room join cutoff and message deletion before they are shown, because a search index stores content, not visibility.

Substring Fallback
Indexes match words; the built-in scan matches substrings. If no search plugin is installed, or the index returns nothing for the query, or the indexer errors, the plugin falls back to its own bounded scan — so recall is never worse than before, it is just slower in that case. The socket response reports which engine ran in its engine field (index, scan or none).

Performance Focused
Matching is done against raw message content first, so the expensive render pipeline runs only for actual hits. Rooms are scanned in parallel with bounded concurrency, and the number of matches kept per room is capped, so a very common word cannot make a single busy room dominate the whole request.

Stable, Chronological Results
Every room the user can see is scanned on every search, and all matches are then ranked globally by timestamp before the result list is cut. The result set therefore does not shift around as rooms move up and down the recent-chats list.

Sticky UI
Your search query and results remain visible when navigating between chat rooms.

Smart Navigation
Clicking a search result scrolls directly to the message and highlights it with a smooth transition.

Rich Previews
Results include room names, sender avatars, and timestamps, matching the native NodeBB interface.

English + Hebrew Friendly Server-generated labels now adapt correctly for English and Hebrew users instead of relying on hard-coded Hebrew text.

🛠 Technical Details

Hooks Used

• static:app.load — server initialization
• filter:scripts.client — injecting the search interface into the chat UI

DOM Management

Uses a MutationObserver to ensure the search bar is injected correctly regardless of how the chat page loads.

State Management

Implements window.chatSearchState so search results persist during Ajaxify navigation.

Error Handling

Rooms that fail to scan are reported to the client instead of being silently treated as empty, and the client applies its own timeout so a lost socket acknowledgement surfaces as an error rather than an endless spinner.

Limits

With an index, nodebb-plugin-dbsearch returns at most 100 mids per query, ranked by its own relevance score rather than by time; the UI says so when a result set was cut.

The fallback scan is linear. To keep it bounded it scans at most the newest 20,000 messages per room, keeps at most 200 matches per room, and returns at most 200 results overall. Note that this scan reads every message object through NodeBB's shared object cache (40,000 entries), so on very large forums frequent fallback scans will evict other cached data — installing a search plugin is the way to avoid that.

Compatibility

Built for NodeBB ^3.0.0 || ^4.0.0

📥 Installation

Install the plugin via terminal:

npm install nodebb-plugin-chat-search

Then:

1. Activate the plugin in the Admin Control Panel (ACP)
2. Rebuild your NodeBB instance
3. Restart the forum

🔗 Links

GitHub
https://github.com/palmoni5/nodebb-plugin-chat-search

Issues
Report bugs or request features via the repository issue tracker.

💬 Feedback

Feedback, suggestions, and feature requests are welcome.
If this plugin helps you, consider starring the repository ⭐