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) 2016-2025 FreneticLLC, All Rights Reserved.

Licensing is likely to change in the future if we actually end up using this.

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.