Interpoll - The Internet Poll

Poll based social media website. Create, Share, Vote and Debate Polls.

Deployed at https://interpoll.netlify.app/

Backend deployed with heroku

Frontend deployed with netlify

Note: You may have to wait a few seconds for the backend to "wake up" or load. This is because the backend is hosted on a Heroku free tier server, so it goes to sleep after inactivity.

Tech stack

This website was built with the mern stack

frontend built with react
backend built with express + node
mongodb database

Features

Create polls annonymously
Vote for polls annonymously
View poll results
Create an account
use of JWTs to authenticate user

Creating an account allows you to:

comment on polls
view your vote history, comment history, created polls
edit an delete your polls
edit and delete your comments
edit your accounts settings
delete your account

Possible Improvemnts

refactor UserProfile page
use more components over longer components (maybe)
add better security (don't put jwt in sessionStorage)
JWTs expire when page is closed, this can be quite annoying since opening a link in a new tab can log you out. Should use cookies for JWTs instead
There is a bit of delay on delete operations, which results in a unsatisfactory user experience.
deleting a comment sometimes requires the user to click the delete button twice.

Installation and Setup

First run npm install then you will have access to the following commands.

To install dependencies run npm run install

In order to run the application you need to create a .env file in the server directory. In this .env file you need to define the following:

MONGODB_URI=<YOUR_URL_HERE>: This is the link to your database
JWT_SECRET=<YOUR_JWT_SECRET_HERE>: This is the JWT server used to encrypt JWT tokens.
Optional: PORT=<YOUR_PORT_HERE>: This is the port your backend server runs on.

Edit the client/src/index.js file and fill in your backend url as indicated by the YOUR_BACKEND_URL_HERE string. By default the url is http://localhost:5000, however you may change this if you used a different port.

To run the application run npm run start. This will open the application in your web brower. If the application does not open the url for the webpage can be found in the terminal.

Warning

This is a sample website.

DO NOT USE A PERSONAL PASSWORD WHEN REGISTERING FOR AN ACCOUNT. THE DATABASE CAN BE ACCESSED FROM ALL SOURCES.