zergabriel/guild

a node+koa+postgres forum currently in production

Guild

Work in progress

Features

Post Ratings

Users can express appreciation for posts they liked, laughed at, found helpful, etc. without having to write a post. They just click the rating button. By reducing the barrier to this kind of feedback, more people are willing to provide it.

User last-online-at tracking

Users are considered "online" if they've visited the forum within 15 minutes.

When a user is offline, the forum shows when they were online last.

Users that want more privacy can enable "Ghost Mode" which hides the last-online-at field on their posts and remove them from the "Who's Online" list.

Viewer tracking

The forum tracks the visitors that are viewing each page and then presents this info to all visitors. It makes the forum feel more alive and gives users a feel for the "regulars" of the subforums they frequent.

Logged-in users that have "Ghost Mode" enabled and unauthenticated visitors are considered guests.

BBCode editor + preview

The BBCode editor, the preview button, and the BBCode error output are implemented with patched versions of the Bootstrap Markdown and Extendible-BBCode-Parser libraries.

Setup and Install

The Guild is a Node.js app (v0.11.x) that talks to a Postgres database.

• You'll specifically need the latest version of Node v0.11.x (unstable) for your system: http://blog.nodejs.org/2014/09/24/node-v0-11-14-unstable/. The Guild won't run on Node v0.10.x (stable).

• The Guild depends on the plv8 Postgres extension.

• Download the repository and enter the directory that it created:

    git clone [email protected]:danneu/guild.git
    cd guild
  

• Enter the guild directory and install its dependencies:

    npm install
  

• Launch Postgres (by default it will run on http://localhost:5432) and create an empty database named guild.

    createdb guild
  

• The Guild comes with a command that rebuilds the database with tables and fills them with some data to play with:

    npm run-script reset-db
  

• Now you can launch the server:

    npm start
    > Listening on http://localhost:3000
  

Config and Environment Variables

The Guild is configured with environment variable listed in server/config.js.

It will run with the default variables, but some features are turned off until they are configured:

• Email-sending system requires AWS_KEY and AWS_SECRET (your http://aws.amazon.com/ API creds)
• User registration system requires RECAPTCHA_SITEKEY and RECAPTCHA_SITESECRET (your https://www.google.com/recaptcha/intro/index.html API creds)

TODO

• Add tests for authorization abstraction
• Create docs/bulk_updates.sql
• Add online-status to post user-meta for mobile-sized devices
• Fix slow BBCode tags like [tabs] so that I can possibly render BBCode on the fly instead of pre-baking it in the html columns
• Finish BBCode support in convos
• Create cronjob (Heroku Scheduler) for db.clearExpiredViews
• I'm sorting friendships by latest_online_at DESC NULLS LAST on homeage. Do I have an index on that in prod?