FlowChat — An open-source, live updating, threaded chat platform with voting.

FlowChat is an open-source, self-hostable, live-updating discussion platform, featuring communities, discussions with threaded conversations, and voting.

It can act as an alternative to forums, as a private team communication platform(like slack), a content creation platform(like reddit), or a voting/polling platform like referendum.

Flowchat tries to solve the problem of having a fluid, free-feeling group chat, while allowing for side conversations so that every comment isn't at the top level. Multiple conversations can take place at once, without interrupting the flow of the chatroom.

It uses range voting(also known as olympic score voting) for sorting comments, discussions, and communities. Range voting is more expressive than simple 👍 or 👎 votes.

Check out the default community, vanilla, or create your own.

It features:

A complete discussion platform with communities, and live-updating threaded discussions.
Private or public discussions and communities
Customizable sorting, by recentness, and popularity.
Hashtags for discussions and communities.
Discussion/Community creators can block users, appoint moderators, or delete comments.

Tech used:

Java Spark, Bootstrap v4, Angular2, Angular-cli, ng2-bootstrap, ActiveJDBC, Liquibase, Postgres, Markdown-it, angular2-toaster

Check out a sample discussion here.

Join the subreddit: /r/flowchat

Change log

Screenshots:

Installation

If you want to self-host flowchat.

Requirements

Java 8 + Maven
Node + npm, nvm is the preferred installation method.
Postgres 9.3 or higher

Download Flowchat

git clone https://github.com/tchoulihan/flowchat

Setup a postgres database

Here are some instructions to get your DB up and running.

Edit your pom.xml file to point to your database

cd flowchat
vim service/pom.xml

Edit it to point to your own database:

<!--The Database location and login, here's a sample-->
<jdbc.url>jdbc:postgresql://127.0.0.1/flowchat</jdbc.url>
<jdbc.username>postgres</jdbc.username>
<jdbc.password></jdbc.password
<!--The sorting for discussions, comments, and tags are:
 	Sorting score =
		created_weight/(now_seconds - comment_seconds) +
		number_of_votes*number_of_votes_weight +
		avg_rank*avg_rank_weight-->
<sorting_created_weight>3600</sorting_created_weight>
<sorting_number_of_votes_weight>0.001</sorting_number_of_votes_weight>
<sorting_avg_rank_weight>0.01</sorting_avg_rank_weight>

Install flowchat

for local testing:

./install.sh and goto http://localhost:4567/

for a production environment, edit ui/config/environment.prod.ts to point to your hostname, then run:

./install.sh -prod

You can redirect ports in linux to route from port 80 to this port:

sudo iptables -t nat -I PREROUTING -p tcp --dport 80 -j REDIRECT --to-ports 4567

Bugs and feature requests

Have a bug or a feature request? If your issue isn't already listed, then open a new issue here.

russgray/flowchat