Overview of My Submission

For the Redis Hackathon, I've reimplemented portions of Forem, the software that runs this website. I've named it "Fauxrem" (pronounced foh-rem) because it's a fake version of Forem. The code is available on GitHub, available under the MIT license, and you can see a demo of the app running on Heroku.

Some of the features:

• User accounts
• Authentication
• Posting
  • Drafts vs published posts
  • Tags
  • Commenting (though currently no threading)
  • Likes
  • Reading List
  • Notifications on likes/comments
• Users can follow users
• Users can follow tags
• The feed
  • Similar to Forem, the logged-in feed is a bit different from the feed shown to anonymous users
  • The feed shown to anonymous users shows the highest-rated content over the feed duration (the past few weeks), with "highest-rated" being based on:
    • the amount of time people spent viewing your post
    • the number of comments
    • the number of likes
  • Your personalized feed contains posts only from users you follow and tags you follow, in reverse-chronological order
  • You can mute words from your feed, so if there's too much content you didn't want (for example, if you're not a JavaScript developer), you can actively filter out those terms
• Full-text search
  • Includes advanced search (such as author:jgaskins title:redis body:hackathon to search for my posts that have "redis" specifically in the title and "hackathon" specifically in the body), which Forem does not support since the removal of Elasticsearch
• Moderator/Admin roles
  • Moderation
    • Users can report posts
    • Mods can unpublish posts in response to a report or ignore the report altogether
  • Administration
    • Banish users
    • Edit static pages
• Rate limiting to mitigate the following:
  • Bot scraping, a big problem for content sites
  • Pressure on the Redis database
  • Manipulation of post ratings

Redis Modules

• RediSearch provides all querying of multiple entities, including full-text search
  • Also, I believe if you use Redis Enterprise, you can search across an entire cluster, so if you have a cluster, you only need to change one line of code to use the Cluster adapter
• RedisJSON is used to store the Post, User, and Comment entities, allowing for atomic updating rather than the fetch-mutate-persist cycle
• RedisTimeSeries for storing/querying metrics on how your content is performing

Submission Category

Wacky Wildcards

Language Used

Crystal, using my own Redis client.

Link to Code

Additional Resources / Info

• The Crystal programming language
• My own Crystal Redis client supporting Redis clustering as well as various Redis modules such as RedisJSON, RediSearch, RedisTimeSeries, and RedisGraph
• Armature, the web framework used (which also uses Redis to store session data)
• The markd shard by @icyleaf provides Markdown parsing

Screenshots

The feed

Notifications

Collaborators

None

• Check out Redis OM, client libraries for working with Redis as a multi-model database.
• Use RedisInsight to visualize your data in Redis.
• Sign up for a free Redis database.