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FreneticForum

Welcome to the Frenetic Forum, built in ASP.NET Core MVC!

If you're seeing this, you're probably horrendously lost.

Notice

At current stage, FreneticForum is Copyright (C) 2016-2021 FreneticLLC, All Rights Reserved.

Licensing is likely to change in the future.

Project Status

Early development. Nothing is remotely ready to use!

Setup

  • Create, setup, and reasonably secure a MongoDB server instance.
    • You will need a (non-admin) user with readWrite access to a single db.
  • Install .NET Core CLI.
  • Install NPM (Node Package Manager, generally included with package labeled like nodejs, may require special install steps - google helps!).
  • Install NPM package gulp and related (at a command line, npm install gulp rimraf gulp-concat gulp-cssmin gulp-uglify gulp-rename).
    • Probably need to npm install -g gulp (with the -g flag) as root.
  • Probably blacklist the launch port (which is 8050 by default) to be disallowed for everyone but you - for safety during the setup phase.
  • Download this source repository, open a command line to its directory, restore associated data (run dotnet restore) and run it (run development.bat or start.bat / start.sh).
  • Connect to the server in the path its at (Server URL (or localhost), with port 8050 by default) to be automatically directed to the install page.
    • Make sure config file folder is editable by the server process user. (Defaults to local path, ./config/)
    • To change your config file folder location, edit the marked variable near the top of ForumInit.cs.
  • Configure everything as per instructions, and press the button at the bottom.
  • You can log in as admin with the password you gave on the install page.
  • It is recommended at this point that you register yourself a separate account, and give it admin access of its own, so that you are not logging in as the root admin normally.
  • Configure the forum however you wish via the administrative control panel.
  • If you blacklisted the launch port, at this point remove that blacklisting.
  • Optionally, use apache or similar as a mid-point for connections.
  • Invite some users and start posting!

Plan / Outline

  • General
    • Everything backed by MongoDB for data.
  • Account System
    • A simple Collection of users, stored as documents.
    • A full account management setup with registration, login, logout, etc.
    • Usable as a generic account-server.
    • Semi-relational data, not all dumped into the user document.
  • BBCode Parser
    • An engine to parse BBCode.
    • Supports an administrator-definable list of BBCodes, including a sample set that can be modified.
  • Forum
    • Index
      • Display a list of all sections.
        • Sorted by administrators manually.
        • Info on each section, including latest post meta.
        • No pagination.
        • Broken up into Categories (not separately viewable).
    • Section Index
      • Display a list of all topics in section.
        • Sorted by changable criteria, with default mode specified globally or per-section by administrators.
        • Info on each topic, including latest message meta and original message meta.
        • Paginated.
    • Topic View
      • Display a list of all posts in topic.
        • Sorted by date, always.
        • Paginated.
        • Full contents of each post. Meta on left side, content on right side (main space).
          • Contents are BBCode-Parsed.
  • Related
    • Installer System
      • Only available once per install of a forum.
      • Shows up whenever configuration file is not-found.
      • Creates the configuration file. (Admins are informed to allow access to the specific config file, or change the file an easily edited source text file!)
      • Initializes the backing database with some basic empty collections, and one default admin user, which is configured by installing admin.
    • Admin Panel
      • Full control of the entire system.
    • Moderator Panel
      • Control over and information on user activities (EG reports).
    • User Control Panel
      • Good level of control for a user over their own account, alongside basic settings such as board theme.
    • User Private Messaging (PM) Service
      • Way for users to contact each other.
  • Other
    • Simple 'pages builder'.
      • A way to build generic web pages easily within the forum's domain.
  • Search Engine
    • Maintain a mapping of keywords to posts
      • IE, for each word in the post that should be validly searchable, set an indexed database key with that name to contain a reference ID of the post.

Database Outline

  • tf_users
    • Index on: uid (long), username (string)
    • Also has: email (string), display_name (string), password (hashed binary string)
    • Also has: banned (bool), banned_until (date string), ban_reason (string)
    • Also has: active (bool), activation_code (string)
    • Also has: register_date (date string), last_login_date (date string)
    • Also has: uses_tfa (bool), tfa_internal (string), tfa_backups (string)
    • Also has: account_type (int32), roles (array of strings)
    • Also has: websess_codes (array of strings)
  • tf_settings
    • Index on: name (string)
    • Also has: value (string)
  • tf_sections
    • Index on: name (string), uid (long)
    • Also has: description (string)
  • tf_topics
    • Index on: uid (long) section_id (long)
    • Also has: title (string), main_post (long), post_uids (array of longs)
    • Also has tags (array of strings)
  • tf_posts
    • Index on: uid (long)
    • Also has: contents (BBCode string), author_uid (long), author_username (string), post_date (date string)
  • tf_search
    • Index on: keyword (string)
    • Also has: posts (array of int32s)

Random Concept Write-Ups

  • Forum user/post reporting
    • Rather than provide a built-in report system separate from existing functionality,
    • It is likely best to set up a "quiet" "self-only" forum section.
    • This section would show a user their own reports and postings in it by themselves and admins, but not other users' reports.
    • Admins can freely browse the section.
    • Goes well with the tag system to mark a report open/resolved/etc.
  • Tag System
    • Forum topics can be tagged.
    • This is for searchability and content visibility.
    • EG, a topic might be tagged "Open" initially, then changed to "Resolved" later.
    • Allows multiple tags per topic.
    • Common tags can be configured by admins to be selected-from and given special indication color.
    • Alternately, users can specify their own uncolored tags.