Qbox Project

Qbox is my attempt at making a Q&A site like CuriousCat. I'm tired of the new Q&A sites that require you to install an app. This will just be a website, no app installation required.

Setup Instructions

1. Clone the repository:

   git clone https://github.com/VertyyBird/qbox.git
   cd qbox
   

2. Install the required dependencies:

   pip install -r requirements.txt
   

3. Generate a secret key for your .env file:

   python -c 'import secrets; print(secrets.token_hex(16))'
   

4. Initialize the database (after creating/activating a virtualenv and installing requirements):

   FLASK_APP=app.py flask db upgrade
   

5. Run the application:

   python app.py
   

6. Open your web browser and go to http://127.0.0.1:5000/ to see the application in action.

Running Tests

After installing the dependencies you can run the automated test suite with:

pytest

The tests use Flask's test client and an in-memory SQLite database, so no additional setup is required.

Anonymous questions

Logged-in users can toggle Ask Anonymously when submitting a question. The site records who asked the question for moderation but hides the sender's identity from other users.

URLs and routes

• User pages live at /user/<username>.
• Answers have permalinks at /user/<username>/a/<public_id>.
• Account settings are at /settings.
• Admins (users with is_admin=True) can review reports/flags at /admin/moderation.

Moderation and avatars

• Question submission is rate-limited per IP and can be flagged/hidden by receivers; admins can block users or IPs with optional expiry.
• Answers can be reported and reviewed in the admin panel; reports do not auto-hide answers.
• Avatar URLs must use allowed hosts, valid image extensions, be reachable, and be no larger than 300x300px.

Template notes

All HTML templates in the templates folder extend base.html. Because of this, they do not include their own <!DOCTYPE> declarations. Running an HTML linter on these individual files may result in warnings about the missing doctype.

To lint the fully rendered pages instead of the raw templates, you can fetch a page from the running development server and pipe it to tidy:

curl http://127.0.0.1:5000/ | tidy -config .tidyrc

License

This project is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0.

You must:

• Provide the full source code if you distribute or host a modified version.
• Attribute the original author VeryyBird.
• Distribute derivatives under the same licence.

Full licence: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html

When adding new source files, include the AGPLv3 notice at the top of each file.