F3

A Full Featured Forum created with Ruby on Rails, backed by Postgres.

Developed with:

• Ruby 2.1.4
• Rails 4.2
• PostgreSQL 9.4

F3 is under active development; details contained in the following sections are likely to change.

Setup

In the project root directory:

bundle install

A configuration file, config/application.yml must be created prior to performing the database setup and must contain the following fields (values are examples and should be changed to meet your settings):

SECRET_KEY_BASE: "5d5f8974df82fe558a16b5fb6586e2eb4c045715ae49a7a10c0ff056350a7923dc761e3e80e5381498a1b235bd9ad0f2b66573f5cee455c60f7f6e0c50e8d1cc"
SECRET_KEY_BASE_STAGING: "c6885894de9ca7281baa0fbee8adc736631afac5c742961f2e359e7f344801338d1c3e08f27a170350d8278f73c01459beffa7be27c52184d911ab673c02a1a6"
DB_USER: "postgres_username"
DB_PASS: "your_password"
F3_EMAIL: "email@example.com"
F3_EMAIL_PASS: "your_email_password"

SECRET_KEY_BASE values can be generated via:

rake secret

DB_USER and DB_PASS are the login credentials for the Postgres account that will access your database.

F3_EMAIL and F3_EMAIL_PASS are the login credentials for the mailer; signup confirmation emails, etc will be sent from this address.

Once your Postgres server is able to be connected to:

bundle exec rake db:create
bundle exec rake db:migrate
bundle exec rake db:seed

A script for (re)setting the dev database is provided in bin/reset_dev_db.

Do note that seed file contains "demo" data in addition to data that must be preloaded for F3 to operate, such as a default guest group that non-logged in users will be added to.

Screenshots

Forum Index

Forum Show

Topic View

User Profile View

Merging Posts

Admin Site

View Forum Permissions

Edit Group

Tests

Specs are written with mintest-rails and require factory_girl.

To run tests:

bundle exec rake test

Features

• Categories/Forums

  • CRUD
  • Hiding
  • Locking
  • Archiving
  • Infinite nesting of forums

• Topics

  • CRUD
  • Locking
  • Hiding
  • Pinning
  • Blocking new topics
    • via lock
    • via permissions

• Posts

  • CRUD
  • Blocking replies
    • via lock
    • via permissions

• Rich Text

  • Editor/Input
  • Pluggable formatters?
  • Emoji

• Users

  • Reputation system
  • User levels (post count, etc)
  • Flavor titles

• Usergroups

  • Global permissions
  • Forum-specific permissions w/support for inheritance

• Auditing

  • History of user actions

• Search

  • By user
  • By content

• Optimization

  • Caching
    • Rails-based
      • Page
      • Action
      • Fragment
      • Low-level
      • SQL
    • DB-backed
      • add'l columns for expensive attrs (e.g. page view counter)

Implementation

Authentication

User authentication is performed by Devise, with support for guest users (not logged in).

Group Permissions

User authorization is achieved with Pundit.

A pessimistic group-based permission system is in place that allows specifying permissions at the group and forum levels with support for inheritance. Any forum may inherit permissions from its parent. If a forum has no parent (i.e. it is a root forum) it may inherit from the group-wide permission set.

Administration

An administration panel is made available using Active Admin. It allows for CRUD operations on objects that are not well suited for editing via the inline moderation tools, such as editing permissions, creating groups, etc.

Auditing

Actions performed on database-backed objects are logged via PaperTrail. The acting user, IP and user-agent are all logged. The object and changes performed on it are serialized as JSON (JSONB column type in postgres).

Infinite Forum Nesting

Forums are structured via adjacency lists:

• Easy to add leaf nodes
• Relocation is simple - just change the forum's forum_id to point to a new parent forum
• pgsql supports WITH RECURSIVE for efficient querying