Online Gossip Box

📌 About the Project

Our project is a real-time anonymous messaging platform designed for student events, conferences, and interactive gatherings. It allows users to submit anonymous gossip, notes, and questions, which are then displayed on a large public screen — but only after passing through a moderation panel. The platform supports real-time interaction, smooth moderation workflows, and is fully web-based for universal accessibility.

The app was developed during a hackathon by two developers eager to create a fun, functional, and meaningful tool for student engagement and anonymous feedback. Whether it’s for a university festival, dorm party, Q&A session, or orientation event, this platform makes it easy to gather authentic input from the crowd — safely and anonymously.

💡 What Inspired Us

The idea came from our own experience attending student events and noticing a recurring problem: people are often hesitant to speak up in public, even when they have great questions, feedback, or hilarious stories to share. We also saw the popularity of anonymous message boards and thought — why not build something live and moderated, tailored for events?

We envisioned a tool that could:

Boost audience participation
Enable honest questions and feedback
Add a layer of humor and spontaneity to events
Protect against spam and inappropriate content through moderation

🚀 How We Built It

We developed the project in hackathon using AI Bolt.new, which significantly accelerated our workflow. The platform allowed us to generate UI components, structure our backend, and rapidly build out features without writing repetitive boilerplate code.

Key features include:

Room creation for separate events
Moderator dashboard for approving/denying messages
Presenter view for public display with a QR code for submissions
Anonymous message submission via mobile
Real-time updates with WebSocket broadcasting
Option to highlight selected messages on-screen

🧠 What We Learned

This project helped us explore how real-time systems, moderation pipelines, and multi-role interfaces (moderator, presenter, participant) can be designed to work smoothly together. We learned how to build a system that balances freedom of expression with responsible moderation, and how subtle UI choices (like confirmation animations or QR code visibility) impact engagement.

Thanks to Bolt.new, we also saw how AI can streamline development to the point where two developers can build a complete real-time web app in a matter of hours — without compromising on design or structure.

🤖 Development Experience

We encountered no blockers or technical challenges during the hackathon. Bolt.new handled:

Component generation for the dashboard and submission forms
State logic for message approval and transitions
Fast iteration for responsive layouts and page routing

This gave us more time to focus on the user experience, interface flow, and event-based features, rather than debugging or setup.

🎯 Why This Project Matters

Whether at a student conference, club meeting, or school event, communication is key — and often difficult to achieve openly. Our app solves this by: