biohack.me forum archive

This application serves as a way to view a read-only archive of the biohack.me forums, formerly run on Vanilla from January 2011 to July 2024.

Once we decided to decommission these forums, it was agreed that an archive should be kept. However, keeping a copy of Vanilla running with posting disabled would still necessitate maintaining and upgrading Vanilla, which is overkill for an archive. And, making a flat HTML dump of the forum would make it so search would only work with external search engines.

So, I (@tekniklr), decided to roll up a quick rails app to connect to the existing Vanilla database via a read-only connection.

If you had an account on the forums and are in the archive and wish to have either your posts anonymized or removed entirely, email us and let us know.

Care and feeding

Patreon badges and shoutouts are handled via a cron task that talks directly to the database - no Vanilla install required. These can continue operating despite the forum being a read-only archive.

When former forum users want their data updated, this is possible directly in the database (e.g., with phpMyAdmin).

If they previously had their email visible on their profile and want it hidden, this can be done with:

update GDN_User set ShowEmail=1 where UserID=<id>;

Their email, in addition to potentially being shown on their profile, is also used to pull gravatar avatars so should not be nullified for a non-deleted user.

If they want to have their content removed they have two options:

1. Keep user content - Invalidate/anonymize the user account and anonymize their content (it will show as being authored by [Deleted User]).

delete from GDN_UserAuthentication where UserID=<id>;
delete from GDN_UserRole where UserID=<id>;
delete from GDN_Invitation where InsertUserID=<id> or AcceptedUserID=<id>;
delete from GDN_Activity where InsertUserID=<id>;
delete from GDN_Log where RecordUserID=<id> and Operation='Pending';
delete from GDN_UserCategory where UserID=<id>;
delete from GDN_BadgeAward where UserID=<id>;
delete from GDN_UserPoints where UserID=<id>;
delete from GDN_Draft where InsertUserID=<id>;
update GDN_User set Name='[Deleted User]', Photo='', About='', Title='', Location='', Password=SUBSTRING(MD5(RAND()) FROM 1 FOR 16), HashMethod='Random', About='', Email=concat('user_',UserId,'@deleted.invalid'), ShowEmail='0', Gender='u', CountVisits=0, CountInvitations=0, CountNotifications=0, InviteUserID=null, DiscoveryText='', Preferences=null, Permissions=null, Attributes=null, DateSetInvitations=null, DateOfBirth=null, DateFirstVisit=null, DateLastActive=null, DateUpdated=SYSDATE(), InsertIPAddress=null, LastIPAddress=null, HourOffset='0', Score=null, Admin=0, Points=0, Deleted=1 where UserID=<id>;

2. Blank user content - Invalidate/anonymize the user account and negate their content with a message stating the user has been deleted (In addition to changing the content author to [Deleted User], their discussion and comment content will be replaced with The user and all related content has been deleted.). This gives a visual cue that there is missing information.

delete from GDN_UserAuthentication where UserID=<id>;
delete from GDN_UserRole where UserID=<id>;
delete from GDN_Invitation where InsertUserID=<id> or AcceptedUserID=<id>;
delete from GDN_Activity where InsertUserID=<id>;
delete from GDN_Log where RecordUserID=<id> and Operation='Pending';
delete from GDN_UserCategory where UserID=<id>;
delete from GDN_BadgeAward where UserID=<id>;
delete from GDN_UserPoints where UserID=<id>;
delete from GDN_Draft where InsertUserID=<id>;
delete from GDN_UserDiscussion where UserID=<id>;
update GDN_User set Name='[Deleted User]', Photo='', About='', Title='', Location='', Password=SUBSTRING(MD5(RAND()) FROM 1 FOR 16), HashMethod='Random', About='', Email=concat('user_',UserId,'@deleted.invalid'), ShowEmail='0', Gender='u', CountVisits=0, CountInvitations=0, CountNotifications=0, InviteUserID=null, DiscoveryText='', Preferences=null, Permissions=null, Attributes=null, DateSetInvitations=null, DateOfBirth=null, DateFirstVisit=null, DateLastActive=null, DateUpdated=SYSDATE(), InsertIPAddress=null, LastIPAddress=null, HourOffset='0', Score=null, Admin=0, Points=0, Deleted=1, CountDiscussions=0, CountUnreadDiscussions=0, CountComments=0, CountDrafts=0, CountBookmarks=0 where UserID=<id>;
update GDN_Discussion set Body="The user and all related content has been deleted.", Format="Deleted" where InsertUserID=<id>;
update GDN_Comment set Body="The user and all related content has been deleted.", Format="Deleted" where InsertUserID=<id>;

DO NOT simply delete user data from the GDN_User table as this does not actually remove very much of their data or content, and may cause unexpected behavior in the archive.

Obviously, if other users mention a deleted user by name or quote their content in their own comments, this will remain.

See the Vanilla source code(1,2) for more details on how vanilla handled deleting users, which is what the SQL above is based on.

Development

You will need ruby and MySQL set up on your local development machine.

After cloning this repository, run:

gem install bundler
bundle install

Create new config/master.key and config/credentials.yml.enc files:

bundle exec rails secret | cut -c-32 > config/master.key
EDITOR=vim rails credentials:edit

Copy the provided config/database.yml.example file to config/database.yml and set a database password you will use in the MySQL setup below.

Then, set up a development database:

mysql -u root -p

and in the MySQL console, using the password you set in config/database.yml, above:

create database biohackme_vanilla;
create database biohackme_vanilla_test;
create user 'biohackme' identified by '<password>';
grant all privileges on biohackme_vanilla.* to 'biohackme';
grant all privileges on biohackme_vanilla_test.* to 'biohackme';

(local development will need all database privileges to set up the database; in production only select is needed)

If you have access to a .sql dump of the production forum database (e.g., you have access to our backups), you can now populate your development database (it will prompt you for the password you set up above):

mysql -u biohackme -p biohackme_vanilla < vanilla.sql

Otherwise, you can now set it up with the provided schema and seed data:

rails db:schema:load
rails db:seed

If all went well, you can run our (minimal) tests with:

rails db:test:prepare
rails test

And start up a local server with:

rails s

The development site should now be available at http://localhost:3000.

Deploying

If you are part of the team that has access to deploy this to the web, you will have to set up github to accept changes from your computer by adding a public SSH key.

You should also SSH to the server and add your public SSH key to the .ssh/authorized_keys file.

Then, after pushing your changes to github, all you have to do is run:

cap production deploy

from your local machine.

Contributing

1. Fork this repository
2. Clone your forked repository
3. Commit your changes
4. Open a pull request

Credits

When no uploaded user avatar or gravatar was available, user avatars are generated using DiceBear's Bottts, which is licensed free for personal and commercial use.