https://github.com/cribbles/tiktak

anonymous forum engine for Rails 4
https://github.com/cribbles/tiktak

Last synced: 1 day ago
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anonymous forum engine for Rails 4

• Host: GitHub
• URL: https://github.com/cribbles/tiktak
• Owner: cribbles
• License: mit
• Created: 2015-05-22T14:55:03.000Z (over 9 years ago)
• Default Branch: master
• Last Pushed: 2015-10-02T21:30:35.000Z (about 9 years ago)
• Last Synced: 2023-05-19T07:22:05.390Z (over 1 year ago)
• Language: Ruby
• Homepage: https://acb-api.herokuapp.com/
• Size: 666 KB
• Stars: 0
• Watchers: 3
• Forks: 0
• Open Issues: 2
• Metadata Files:
  • Readme: README.md
  • License: LICENSE

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README

        
# TikTak

[Live](http://acb-api.herokuapp.com/).

## Summary

TikTak provides a light-weight, Yik Yak-like anonymous forum system with

BBS-style assets.

## Languages:

- Ruby

- Javascript

- HTML/CSS

## Frameworks:

- Rails 4

- SASS

## Libraries and Technologies:

- jQuery

- will_paginate

- Rack::Attack

- SettingsLogic

- [Faker::YikYak](https://github.com/cribbles/faker-yikyak)

- reCAPTCHA

## Test Suite

- Rspec

- FactoryGirl

- Capybara

## Features

- Secure, hand-rolled Rails user auth

- E-mail authentication

- Password resets

- Private messaging

- Post quoting

- Hellbanning

- IP whitelisting / blacklisting / caching

- Post reporting

- A straight-forward moderation system

## Deploying

Site-wide globals, e.g. the name of your campus or institution, are stored in

[`config/settings.yml`](./config/settings.yml) and accessed through the

Settings

model.

TikTak uses user mailers (for sign-in / sign-up / lost password) and reCAPTCHA

(for spam control). You'll need to get these set up for production.

I deployed mailers with Heroku using Sendgrid. If you configuration is

different, you'll need to change your settings in

`config/environments/production.rb`.

## Notes

### Private Messaging

TikTak is fully anonymous, so private messaging works differently than on most

social platforms.

Anyone who's signed in has the ability to make themselves available for contact

by other registered users. When you send someone a private message, you can

offer to exchange e-mails through the application's handshake system. If they

accept, the e-mails for both sender and recipient will be revealed to each

other.

In production, you'll definitely want to provide an e-mail regex specific to

your campus / institution / organization in

[`config/settings.yml`](./config/settings.yml). This helps to ensure integrity

among contactees. The principle behind exchanging e-mails is that only

individuals who have authenticated through a 'my-cool-school.edu' account

should

be available for contact. (Of course, this says nothing about who _in

particular_ a user might be getting in contact with.)

### Hellbanning

TikTak provides an implementation of

[hellbanning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stealth_banning) (also known as

shadowbanning on some sites).

The conventional practice for hellbanning is to make a registered user's posts

only available to themselves. Because TikTak is anonymous and allows anyone to

post - with or without an account - this won't do. Instead, hellbanning is done

by IP address. A user posting from a hellbanned IP address can view all posts

made by themselves and other hellbanned users, but nobody else can see their

posts.

Hellbanning is tightly coupled to the topic index and show views, to the point

of paginating these views separately for hellbanned and non-hellbanned users.

This way, hellbanned users can appear to be bumping their own and others'

threads, but replying to a thread from a hellbanned IP address won't bump it

for

the rest of the site.

### Seed Data

I wrote a small gem to produce seed data:

[Faker::YikYak](https://github.com/cribbles/faker-yikyak). This makes Danny

Glunz's [YikYakov](https://github.com/dglunz/yikyakov) available in a slightly

more modular form under the [Faker](https://github.com/stympy/faker) namespace

(a la Faker::Hacker).

Calling `Faker::YikYak.words(n)` will produce a Markov chain of length _n_

words, generated from YikYak sample data. See the [Heroku live

site](http://acb-api.herokuapp.com) for an example of what this looks like.

## License

TikTak is released under the [MIT License](/LICENSE).

---

Developed by [Chris Sloop](http://chrissloop.com/)