tagbbs

TagBBS

TagBBS is a tag-based discussion system, based on discussions with @HenryHu.

Design

Aiming to be simple and extensible, the system works against a simple key-value store interface, and should have no internal states. The only requirement of the key-value store is to support a revision field for each key, and update the key only if the new revision is incremented by one.

This package is the core logic of the system and based on it various external interfaces can be built.

A list of interfaces:

• apibbsd provides a CORS enabled web API endpoint. webui is an web app backed by this interface.
• sshbbsd provides a simple SSH service.

Key Types

User Editable Keys:

• post:id are the posts. Readable by
• user:* are user profiles of each user.

System Keys:

• bbs:* are the meta data for the BBS.
  • bbs:name is the name of the BBS.
  • bbs:nextid is the next available post id.
  • bbs:users is a list of all available users.
• userpass:* are the user password hashes.

Index Keys:

• tag:* are the post lists of every tags.

Post

User Editable Keys are mapped to Posts. A Post is a user editable file, usually consists of a YAML header and a Markdown body. A sample Post:

---
title: Hello World
tags: [test]
authors: [thinxer]
---

There goes the content of the post.

The content of the post should be encoded in UTF-8 and use Unix line-ending.

The YAML header is not limited to the predefined keys. It's okay to abuse it for extra information. However, those predefined keys have special meanings and will be respected by the system.

Here is a list of predefined keys:

• title is the title of the the post.
• tags is a list of tags that this post should be listed under.
• authors is a list of users that this post can be edited with. It is not required to include yourself in this list. As a consequence, you cannot edit this post in the future.

Besides the Content, a Post also has a Rev field, which must be incremented by 1 on each edit (an empty post always has revision 0). Upon each edit, a Timestamp will be marked on the post.