Waasabi

Forum hub for project writeups, Q&A, and focused reviews

Waasabi is a calm, reading-first forum for makers and students: long project writeups and practical questions in one feed. It is built for thoughtful feedback and sustained reading rather than fast, noisy threads.

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Screenshots

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Status

• Prototype
• Demo/production: not published yet
• If database tables are missing, demo content is loaded from routes/web.php

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Implemented

• Two content types: projects (long-form) and questions
• Markdown editor (Tiptap), covers and albums, project status (in-progress / paused / done)
• Comment threads + structured project reviews (improve / why / how)
• Feed with filters (fresh / best / reading) and infinite loading
• Tags, showcases, and a reading-now block
• Search across posts, tags, and authors
• Saves, upvotes, reading progress, follows
• Profiles, badges, privacy/notification settings
• Notifications with read/unread state
• Support portal and basic moderation tools

Experimental

• Weighted reporting with auto-hide thresholds
• Text moderation heuristics (low-quality detection)
• Optional image scanning via AWS Rekognition

Planned

• Move large route closures into controllers/services
• Seed demo content via seeders
• Add feature tests for core routes and JSON actions

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Technical overview

Backend

• PHP 8.2, Laravel 12
• Blade templates + routes in routes/web.php (closures + controllers)
• Eloquent ORM + Query Builder
• Sessions, email verification, access policies
• Queues and cache (database by default, Redis optional)

Frontend

• Vite, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS 4
• Tiptap editor + Markdown <-> HTML (marked/turndown)
• Progressive navigation: replace <main> and re-hydrate (custom)

Data and entities

Primary tables: users, posts, post_comments, post_reviews, post_upvotes, post_saves, user_follows, reading_progress, content_reports, moderation_logs, user_notifications, support_tickets, topbar_promos.

Security and anti-spam

• CSRF protection and server-side validation
• Rate limiting per action (see config/waasabi.php)
• Honeypot + Cloudflare Turnstile (optional)
• Moderation and audit logs

Localization

• English and Finnish (resources/lang/en, resources/lang/fi)

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Quick start (local)

git clone https://github.com/KristopherZlo/waasabi
cd waasabi

cp .env.example .env
# Configure DB_* in .env

composer install
npm install

php artisan key:generate
php artisan migrate
php artisan storage:link

php artisan serve   # http://localhost:8000
npm run dev         # Vite + HMR

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License

Closed-source; terms are in LICENSE.

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Author

KristopherZlo.