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:

1. Fork the repo.
2. 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
3. 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!
4. Make the test pass.
5. 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. :)
6. 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)