Jacsy-Jacob's Top Forum

This app lets students ask & answer questions, shop, and stalk other people in college. The aim is to create a common forum for everyone in Uni. Further, it helps to reduce spam emails and share info.

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LIVE DEMO: https://khadkauj.github.io/jacobshack2021uniplatform/

Inspiration

In my first year, there were information that I found out lately which otherwise would have helped me in my studies. So, I thought of creating a forum where we can ask our questions and share information that would help other people. So, I created the first section of my app "Question"

Further, we all face spam emails in our outlook. We do already have a store called Jstore but the problem with it is it is time-consuming to use and not very secure. So, I thought of creating a shop that would let people add and edit their products in no time. I take security as a challenge and intend to make it as secure as possible.

Finally, we all know Jacobs stalk https://people.jacobs.university/privacy.html which lets us stalk other people. For this, we need access to jacobs email address. I found something interesting here. Here, we get a session id which I used to mimic other as me ie. I can put it publicly and everyone can access it. I don't have any intention to sell or violate someone's privacy. This is only for demonstration and would be put down later.

What it does

The first section "Question" lets people ask questions and answers. You can vote questions and answers, and also sort and search questions.

The second section "Shop" lets you add your product to the market. You can go to each product page and see the product details. You can also click on contact no and send a message showing your interest. If it's your product, you can also edit the details, mark it as sold, and delete it.

The last section "stalk" lets you input the university's email username and look at their details.

You need to be authenticated to perform all write, delete and update requests in the database. Further, update and delete requests can only be made by the author.

How we built it

The major frameworks used are React.js, firebase, and express.js. React is used to create frontend applications. Firebase is our google cloud service. We also use Firebase's Firestore to get real-time databases and firebase storage to store bulky files like images. We have firebase analytics to analyze our audience's demography and their events. Also, firebase secure authentication(passwordless sign-in and google OAuth) has been implemented to authenticate our users. Our stalk section and message sending service(implemented with Twilio) are built mostly on Express.js app. It is hosted on Heroku. We used Axios to call our Heroku app from React such that it's more secure. Our frontend application is hosted using GitHub pages.

tools: Google Cloud, analytics and Auth0 with firebase, Twillo for messaging seller in shop, react.js, express.js, Axios, image-resizer.

Challenges we ran into

I tried to use ML and flask but couldn't do it. The text search on firebase isn't good. Managing and combining data is difficult in firebase. No great design idea.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

we're proud that we tried to create something that tries to make people's life easier and managed in Uni.

What we learned

A lot many things. Importance of team. More interest in math, ML, and python.

What's next for hackathonJacobsUniPortal

I want to build it and deploy it officially for the Uni.

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