Live.
TikTak provides a light-weight, Yik Yak-like anonymous forum system with BBS-style assets.
- Ruby
- Javascript
- HTML/CSS
- Rails 4
- SASS
- jQuery
- will_paginate
- Rack::Attack
- SettingsLogic
- Faker::YikYak
- reCAPTCHA
- Rspec
- FactoryGirl
- Capybara
- 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
Site-wide globals, e.g. the name of your campus or institution, are stored in
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.
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. 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.)
TikTak provides an implementation of hellbanning (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.
I wrote a small gem to produce seed data: Faker::YikYak. This makes Danny Glunz's YikYakov available in a slightly more modular form under the 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 for an example of what this looks like.
TikTak is released under the MIT License.
Developed by Chris Sloop