From: Andreas Schwarz <usenet@...>
Date: 2004-10-14T22:14:32+09:00
Subject: Re: To all people writing BBS on Rails: let's join forces

Alexey Verkhovsky wrote:
> I've noticed lately that there are at least four different projects
> starting to build Bulletin Board System (a forum) on Rails.
> 
> Why couldn't we build one BBS, four times bigger and better instead? So
> that we can look anyone in the eye and tell them that we have something
> much better than (for argument's sake) phpBB!
> 
> I would like to invite anyone itching to build a BBS to participate in
> my project (http://www.rubyforge.org/projects/ruby-forum). 
> I would also like to join any project that is closer to production grade
> (Ruby Forum is already "demonstrable", and 10-20 evenings away from
> "barely useable for real life purposes"). 

Hello,

I'm one of the people who are building a forum with Rails.

What I have at the moment is:

At the model level:
* Tree structure with nested set (mainly for the NNTP References header)
* Creating new topics, replying to posts
* Voting for posts
* Topic subscriptions (to receive notifications of new posts)
* User registration/login
* prepared for NNTP server integration (Message-IDs, NNTP-IDs, 
References header)
* Unit tests for most of the functions
* A working NNTP server with reading, posting and user authentication 
(written for an experimental forum I had built a few months ago, not yet 
adapted to the new data structure)

Controller/View:
* Forum list
* Topic list
* Topic view (flat)
* Posting replies
* Registration/Login
* Colored quoting levels
* Anonymous posting

The post text is wrapped to ~72 character lines when it is posted and by 
default displayed in a <pre>, so that it is possible to include indented 
source code and ASCII-schematics. "> " is used for quotings, like in 
mails/usenet. Because the line wrapping is done with format=flowed, it 
is easy to remove the line wrapping for users who want a view like 
normal HTML pages; the quoting level is preserved and represented by 
colored lines at the left border (like in Mozilla).

What I (and most of the users) do NOT want is:
* BB-Code or HTML
* User icons
* Smilies
* Everything else phpBB has ;)

What is still missing:
* Controller & Views for most of the stuff mentioned above
* Functional tests
* File Attachments
* NNTP server integration
* a lot more, don't get fooled by the long feature lists above

When I am writing "the users" I am referring to the users of my forum on 
http://www.mikrocontroller.net/forum/.

The license will probably be GPL or BSD or something like that.

Andreas

-- 
http://www.mikrocontroller.net - Das Mikrocontroller-Forum