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.