In the halcyon days of the late ’90s to early ’00s, there was a form of website known as the "Q&A site." Now, this form of website wasn't a help site like you would imagine today, like StackOverflow and the like. No, the classic Q&A site had a difference.
People could still write in with questions, but instead of getting expert answers, they would see their questions addressed by fictional personas. Anyone from video game and cartoon characters to obvious parodies of celebrities, and even abstract concepts in some cases, would weigh in on your question, and answer it in the most entertaining way possible.
Nowadays, such sites have all vanished from the internet. But it's our hope that, with easy-to-use open-source software to power them, they may one day regain their former glory.
We had this hope once before with the original BeakerTron, which was written in 2004 for PHP 4.3. For various reasons development on it stagnated. But we're back with a fresh approach.
Don't. It's not ready yet.
BeakerTron is a python project, and uses poetry to manage its setup and dependencies and whatnot. You should install poetry according to its instructions (though using pip works in a pinch).
We also use pre-commit to enforce our coding standards. You should install that separately too (again, pip works).
The easiest way to get going is:
git clone https://github.com/Boolean263/BeakerTron
cd BeakerTron
pre-commit install
poetry install --no-root
poetry shell
To run the software in development mode:
flask run
If you try to commit code that the various pre-commit plugins don't like, they'll abort the commit, but they'll also change the affected files. Review the changes, stage them, and add them to your commit, and you should be good. Or, you can run pre-commit run --all-files manually to see what changes it makes without waiting to try and fail a commit.
In roughly chronological order:
- Forum 2010
- Conversatron
- True Meaning of Life (TMoL)
- Hateatron
- Conversawang
- Ask Dr. Science
Conversawang's source code, known as Wangcode, is the first known case of the software behind a Q&A comedy site being made available and shared. It was used in several sites, including Ask Dr. Science, the latter which birthed (and then neglected) the original BeakerTron source code.