Cerca

a forum software

Meaning:

to search, quest, run (it)
near, close, around, nearby, nigh (es)
approximately, roughly (en; from circa)

This piece of software was created after a long time of pining for a new wave of forums hangs. The reason it exists are many. To harbor longer form discussions, and for crawling through threads and topics. For habitually visiting the site to see if anything new happened, as opposed to being obtrusively notified when in the middle of something else. For that sweet tinge of nostalgia that comes with the terrain, from having grown up in pace with the sprawling phpBB forum communities of the mid noughties.

It was written for the purpose of powering the nascent Merveilles community forums.

Features

Customizable: Many of Cerca's facets are customizable and the structure is intentionally simple to enable DIY modification
Private: Threads are public viewable by default but new threads may be set as private, restricting views to logged-in users only
Easy admin: A simple admin panel lets you add users, reset passwords, and remove old accounts. Impactful actions require two admins to perform, or a week of time to pass without a veto from any admin
Transparency: Actions taken by admins are viewable by any logged-in user in the form of a moderation log
Low maintenance: Cerca is architected to minimize maintenance and hosting costs by carefully choosing which features it supports, how they work, and which features are intentionally omitted
RSS: Receive updates when threads are created or new posts are made by subscribing to the forum RSS feed

Config

Cerca supports community customization.

Write a custom about text describing the community inhabiting the forum
Define your own registration rules, how to verify one's account, and link to an existing code of conduct
Set your own custom logo (whether svg, png or emoji)
Create your own theme by writing plain, frameworkless css

To enable these customizations, there's a config file. To choose a config file, run cerca with the --config option; the default config file is set to ./cerca.toml.

cerca --config ./configs/cerca.toml

The configuration format is TOML and the config is populated with the following defaults:

[general]	
name = "" # whatever you want to name your forum; primarily used as display in tab titles
conduct_url = "" # optional + recommended: if omitted, the CoC checkboxes in /register will be hidden
language = "English" # Swedish, English and a few others. contributions for more translations welcome!

[rss]
feed_name = "" # defaults to [general]'s name if unset
feed_description = ""
forum_url = "" # should be forum index route https://example.com. used to generate post routes for feed, must be set to generate a feed

[documents]
logo =  "content/logo.html" # can contain emoji, <img>, <svg> etc. see defaults/sample-logo.html in repo for instructions
about = "content/about.md"
rules = "content/rules.md"
verification_instructions = "content/verification-instructions.md"

Content documents that are not found will be prepopulated using Cerca's sample content files. The easiest thing to do is to run Cerca once and let it populate content files using the samples, and then edit the files in content/* after the fact, before running Cerca again to see your changes.

Either write your own configuration following the above format, or run cerca once to populate it and then edit the created config.

Contributing

If you want to join the fun, first have a gander at the CONTRIBUTING.md document. It lays out the overall idea of the project, and outlines what kind of contributions will help improve the project.

Translations

Cerca supports use with different natural languages. To translate Cerca into your language, please have a look at the existing translations (i18n.go) and submit yours as a pull request.

Local development

Install golang.

To launch a local instance of the forum, run those commands (linux):

go run run.go --dev

It should respond Serving forum on :8277. Just go on http://localhost:8277.

Building binaries with reduced size

This is optional, but if you want to minimize the size of any binary (whether it be the cerca executable or any of the binaries in cmd/ follow the instructions below. Less useful for active development, more useful for sending binaries to other computers.

Pass -ldflags="-s -w" when building your binary:

go build -ldflags="-s -w" .

Additionally, run upx on any generated binary:

upx --lzma cerca