Thredded

The vast majority of messageboard, or "forum", software out there is garbage. Either it's old, bloated or boring. Thredded is an effort to be a modern take on the forum/messageboard space with a modern stack, using modern methodologies - ruby, rails, pg, test-driven.

If you're looking for variations on a theme - see Discourse, Forem, Tectura or Heterotic Beast. The last two are forks from Rick Olsen and Courtenay's Altered Beast. Of those it should be noted that Forem is an engine - not a standalone app.

Demo

Check out thredded.com for a live demo or check out a few screenshots.

Installation:

If you just want to know how to install - please head to the Installation instructions. Details on getting things running on Heroku are included.

Requirements:

Ruby 2.0. This will work with 1.9.3 but the Gemfile will have to be updated by you to accommodate that.
Postgres. Search currently only works with pg, using pg's fulltext search capabilities.

Optional:

SendGrid. For incoming email thredded has built-in support for the SendGrid parse api using griddler.
Resque. Emails will be queued thanks to the resque_mailer gem if you add the thredded_resque gem to thredded's Gemfile.

Features:

Stricken text must still be implemented.

Security per messageboard - private, public or logged in users only
Permissions to post - anonymous, members or logged in users only
Attaching images to posts
Attaching documents to posts
Content Filters - bbcode, markdown
Locking topics
Sticky / Pinned topics
Private topics
Placement of attached images to posts
Logging in via github ~~twitter, facebook, linked in, and Gmail~~
Full-text search

Deploying

The following are the ENV's that need to be set for deployment.

ENV['GOOGLE_ANALYTICS_ID'] - eg: 'UA-#######-1'
ENV['GITHUB_ID'] - for authentication via github, using omniauth, you'll need an app set up. Place the ID here...
ENV['GITHUB_SECRET'] - ... and the secret.
ENV['SECRET_TOKEN'] - the application secret token needs to be generated for environments other than test and development. See ./config/initializers/secret_token.rb
ENV['CANONICAL_HOST'] - if set this will use rack-canonical-host to redirect requests to one canonical host

Contributing

Everyone loves pull requests. Here are some guidelines:

Fork the repo.
Run the tests. Only pull requests with passing tests will be accepted, and it's great to know that you have a clean slate: bundle && rake
Add a test for your change. Only refactoring and documentation changes require no new tests. If you are adding functionality or fixing a bug, it needs a test!
Make the test pass.
I prefer that code adheres to the thoughtbot Style Guide so take a look there, or know that I might refer to it in PR's. :)
Push to your fork and submit a pull request.

Thanks / Acknowledgements

Shaun @thedudewiththething
Jim @saturnflyer
Caleb @calebthompson
Gabe @gabrielpreston
Christian @christianmadden
Jacob @jacobbednarz
Jeffrey @semanticart
Nick @qrush
The entire MI, JA, LGN and MWA crews (thank you all)

jacobbednarz / thredded