lapis-community

A drop in, full featured community and comment system for Lapis projects.

Example community: https://itch.io/community

On itch.io every single community, message board, comment thread is powered by lapis-community. It's suitable for managing many different sub communities with distinct moderators and roles.

How it works

lapis-community provides a collection of Models and Flows for a database backed message board. It includes the application layer (aka server side logic) for interacting with the community using Flows. A Flow is a class that groups common functionality into a single module that works on top of the Lapis action/request interface.

No views are provided (excluding some simple examples) as this is typically the part of the message board that the implementing site will want to customize.

The following features are included:

• Topics
  • Sticky, Locked, and Archived topics
  • Threaded replies
  • Replies can be HTML or markdown
  • Moderation events (e.g. Moderator locked this topic)
  • Mentioning other members with @
  • Efficient pagination of very large topics
  • Pending replies -- allow moderator review before allowing a post to be submitted
  • Soft deletion of replies allows for nested replies to be be lost when post is deleted
  • Voting options for replies: up & down, up only, no voting
  • Reply edit history
  • Topics tags (defined on the category)
  • Pinned replies
• Categories (for organizing topics)
  • Can be nested
    • Directory categories can be used to organize sub-categories without allowing direct topics
  • Categories can individually have title, description, rules along with enforced restrictions for posts
  • Category options can be inherited from their parents when nested
  • Topic sorting rules per category (by votes, by date, etc.)
• Category groups
  • A way to apply moderation rules across many categories that aren't related in a tree hierarchy
• Moderators
  • Special user permissions granted to moderators
• Post Reporting
• Community stats aggregated per user, per topic, per category
• Visibility tracking
  • Tracks if individual user has yet to see a topic, or topic has unseen replies
• Activity logs
  • Keep an auditable history of all actions on the community
  • Separate moderator logs indexed per category
• Bookmarks
  • A way to save topics for viewing later
• Subscriptions
  • For generating notifications when topics are updated
• Search index
  • Full-text search index on replies and topics
• Blocks
  • An account can block another account to not see their posts
• Bans
  • Moderators can ban accounts from posting or seeing their category

The database schema is managed by the Lapis migration system, using a scoped set of migrations. Upgrading the database for a new version of lapis-community is as simple as installing the latest version and running the migration within your own migrations file.

-- migrations.moon
{
  -- ...

  => require("community.schema").run_migrations!
}

Extension interface

No community software perfectly matches the requirements of a particular website or app. lapis-community is built with extensibility in mind. You can customize how things work by either replacing build-in logic, or appending additional logic.

Example

• replacing: using your own models to control who can moderate posts
• appending: using both the built in moderator system and your own models to control who can moderate posts.

• Flows - Since a Flow is a class, you can subclass the flow and replace methods to change how common operations work
• Models - The model loader will attempt to load version of the model from your own local models directory before loading the built in one. This can be used to either subclass (or replace!) build in models to add additional relations and functionality
  • Models have special on_*_callback methods can are designed to be replaced in a subclass to provide additional functionality in response to events in the community

No presentation layer included

lapis-community exposes the models for you to use directly. You can decide how to format the data within when rendering views, whether that's passing them down server-side rendered templates, or converting to JSON for client-side JavaScript templates.

There are flows, however, for fetching the models and preloading all the necessary data. For example, loading the threaded replies for a particular topic on a particular page.

Where it's used

• itch.io: global message board, game communities, every single comment thread eg. https://itch.io/community
• streak.club: streak message boards

Documentation

Coming soon