go-webring

Fork of go-webring customized for the Purdue Hackers webring.

Fork-specific features:

• Notify site owners via Discord when their webring links are broken/missing.

Usage

$ ./go-webring -h
Usage of ./go-webring
  -c, --contact string         Contact instructions for errors (default "contact the admin and let them know what's up")
  -h, --host string            Host this webring runs on, primarily used for validation
  -i, --index string           Path to home page template (default "index.html")
  -l, --listen string          Host and port go-webring will listen on (default "127.0.0.1:2857")
  -m, --members string         Path to list of webring members (default "list.txt")
  -v, --validationlog string   Path to validation log, see docs for requirements (default "validation.log")

This webring implementation handles four paths:

• Root: returns the home page template replacing the string "{{ . }}" with an HTML table of ring members
• Next: returns a 302 redirect pointing to the next site in the list
• Previous: returns a 302 redirect pointing to the previous site in the list
• Random: returns a 302 redirect pointing to a random site in the list
• $validationlog: displays the validation log at the path specified in the command line flags
  • For example, with -v validationlog -h example.com, the path would be example.com/validationlog

The next and previous paths require a ?host= parameter containing a URL-encoded URI of the site being visited. For example, if Sam is a member of a webring on example.com and her site is sometilde.com/~sam, she will need the following links on her page for directing visitors to the next/previous ring members.

• https://example.com/next?host=sometilde.com%2F~sam
• https://example.com/previous?host=sometilde.com%2F~sam

With provided examples

See the included list.txt and index.md for examples of a webring setup. To run go-webring with those examples, first install pandoc then generate index.html from index.md like so:

$ pandoc -s index.md -o index.html

Next, you'll need to install Go and build the project.

$ go build

After that, simply execute the binary then open localhost:2857 in your browser.

$ ./go-webring

With custom files

To run your own webring, you'll first need a template homepage. This should be any HTML file with the string "{{ . }}" placed wherever you want the table of members inserted. This table is plain HTML so you can style it with CSS.

Pandoc produces very pleasing (in my opinion) standalone HTML pages; if you just want something simple, I would recommend modifying the included index.md and generating your homepage as in section above.

To serve other assets, such as styles in a separate .css file, images, etc., place them in the static/ directory; a file at static/favicon.ico will be accessible at https://example.com/static/favicon.ico.

Next, you'll need a text file containing a list of members. On each line should be the member's unique identifer (such as their username), their Discord user ID, and their site's URI omitting the scheme, each separated by a space. For example, if a user is bob and his site is https://bobssite.com, his line would look like the following.

bob 123456789123456789 bobssite.com

See the Discord notifications section for details on the format of the Discord user ID column.

If the user was sam and her site was https://sometilde.com/~sam, her line would look like this:

sam - sometilde.com/~sam

With those two members in the text file, the HTML inserted into the home page will be the following.

<tr>
  <td>bob</td>
  <td><a href="https://bobssite.com">bobssite.com</a><td>
</tr>
<tr>
  <td>sam</td>
  <td><a href="https://sometilde.com/~sam">sometilde.com/~sam</a><td>
</tr>

Assuming this webring is on example.com, Bob will need to have the following links on his page.

• https://example.com/next?host=bobssite.com
• https://example.com/previous?host=bobssite.com

Because Sam has a forward slash in her URI, she'll need to percent-encode it so browsers interpret the parameter correctly.

• https://example.com/next?host=sometilde.com%2F~sam
• https://example.com/previous?host=sometilde.com%2F~sam

Validation

At startup, a concurrent process spins off, checks every member's site for issues, generates a report, and serves the report at the location specified in the command line flag. It rechecks sites every 24 hours and identifies TLS errors, unreachable sites, and sites with missing links. It will eventually follow redirects too, allowing members to move their site without having to notify ring maintainers.

There are some false positives right now, but I'm working on correcting those.

Discord notifications

When a problem is found with a site, a ping can be sent to the Discord user associated with the site. To enable this, enter the Discord user ID to ping as the second column of an entry in the member list file.

Note that the user ID is different from the username. See here for how to find your user ID.

To disable notifications for a user, enter a single hyphen as their user ID. The example of the user sam above shows this.

Finally, you'll need to create a Discord webhook for the server/channel in which you want to send the pings. Once this is done, place the webhook URL in a file and specify the path to this file using the command-line options. You can also specify a specific thread using query parameters in the URL.

Questions & Contributions

For the upstream go-webring project, see here.

If you have questions/comments/suggestions about this project, feel free to open an issue or pull request at https://github.com/kdkasad/go-webring.