CSF stands for Computer Science Forums: the demographic of this project. With all the capabilities of any other forum, CSF stands out for its innovation and intuitive design.
It is intuitive for its folder structure which is familiar to navigate, and it is efficient for the innovative application of C sockets.
CSF performs the majority of its tasks, particularly forum management, in a C daemon. Then a Flask server is deployed to communicate with this daemon, serving information about the forum to the user.
This communication is done entirely through sockets, allowing for high-speed process communication.
But, is this truly groundbreaking or breathtaking as is? No, we thought not. That is why we set up a stress-testing procedurally-posting chat bot using OpenAI to respond to existing threads or posts.
However, there are still things to improve. Luckily, it is an exciting project to work on.
At the top of the screen there's a form which allows you to make a post. Just don't forget to include your username!
The current directory is shown at the top of this form in the Post to line. The scary numbers are unique identifiers of posts, so you know that you are commenting someone when you see such a number in the path.
To go up the directory you have to revert the page back, as there're no internal capabilities to do it as of right now. Neither is there a capability to delete a post from the website, unfortunately.
There are pre-defined folders for various classes that CS students may encounter in their studies.
It's best to post your questions or thoughts into these relevant discussions!
The website consists of so-called "Threads", which describe an object with [content, author, score, and sub-threads], as well as time-of-creation.
Length of the content is bound by 1024 characters (1 kilobyte), and length of authors name is bound by 32 characters
With the existence of a root thread that serves as an anchor point, the entire data is in tree form with a variable number of children.
These children are not ordered and are stored in a stack. To do this, a simple linked list of nodes is used, where each node stores 1 thread.
Threads have different "type", which is used only for display on the frontend part. Comment, Post, and Folder are those types. There's no difference between them in implementation.
The sub threads are not allocated at initialization but are added 1-by-1 dynamically through the add_subthread () function.
The website stores all of its posts in a .txt file, treating it as a database. There are empty lines at the beginning and the end of the file, which are necessary for operation.
Each thread occupies 1 line and is stored in the form
"{depth} {type}~{content}~{author}~{epoch}",
where type and epoch are numbers representing the enumerated type of the Thread and epoch time in seconds for when the post was created respectively.
Content and author are strings that represent the entire content of the post - whether its the name of the folder or several sentences from the post and author is the nickname that the user chooses upon creation of the post.
Depth is a relative number that is used to indicate sub threads. {depth+1} is a sub thread of the latest {depth}, making it a pre-order traversal.
{depth=0} represents the root, and there can be only 1 entry with a depth of 0.
The communication with Python is done through sockets.
Upon receiving a command from Python, we first determine what command is it
There are:
- "list {PATH}"
- "view {PATH}"
- "post {CONTENT}"
where {PATH} is location of a Thread in a tree, i.e. CMPT/125 represents folder '125' located inside folder 'CMPT' which is directly under the root.
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"list {PATH}" takes the path of a Thread and returns all subthreads that belong to it in a string where each line represents a thread. For Posts and Comments it is in form:
"{type}~{author}~{epoch}"And for Folders it is in form:"{type}~{content}~{author}~{epoch}", where content means folder's name Later the python brings every string to the form of the Folder with '' (empty string) representing the content of Posts and Comments (since it's not provided) If there are no sub threads - returns "failure". Primarily used to display contents of the Folder or comments to the Post. -
"view {PATH}" takes the path of a Thread and returns its content as a string. Used for showing the entire content of the post. Allows to avoid rendering it unless the user actually needs it.
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"post {CONTENT}" takes a string of content and creates a post with it, returning "success" if post was created and "failure" otherwise.
After receiving data from program on C, Python prepares the data to send it to JavaScript through Fetch API.
The Flask server is able to translate the URL to a thread-path that correlates to an individual post.
From there, the Flask server communicates with the C Socket to learn about that thread or post.
CSF uses OpenAI's davinciGPT3 to populate the site with posts that are almost indistinguishable from a real person's.
Given some basic prompts davinciGPT3 can create whole threads and fill it with comments.
bulkcreate.py allows you to generate as many threads as you want, as well as with include a random amount of comments, given a prompt.
proceduralgen.py, when run, periodically comments on posts to emulate an active site, taking into account the contexts of the post