Overview

Overview

What this is: ProxyPrints is a fork of chilli-axe/mpc-autofill, image-aggregation and print-automation software for tabletop card proxies (Magic: The Gathering, specifically, on this fork). Frontend: a Next.js static export deployed to GitHub Pages. Backend: Django + Elasticsearch + Postgres, run as a separate service this fork operates independently of upstream's own hosted instance.

Relationship to upstream: frontend and desktop-tool code stay close to upstream's own architecture. This fork's independent work is concentrated on the backend — a weighted-vote consensus system for crowd- and machine-identification of exact card printings/artists/tags, a Discord-OAuth moderation layer on top of it, and supporting infrastructure (an image CDN, a local-file catalog source type) upstream doesn't have. Some of that work is intended to go back upstream eventually — see infrastructure.md's "Upstreaming to chilli-axe/mpc-autofill" section and upstreaming/ for what's queued and how that process works. Until that lands, a few outward-facing links (desktop-tool release channel, wiki) still point at upstream's own, since this fork hasn't built or verified its own equivalents yet — noted here so it isn't a silent surprise, not because it's hidden elsewhere.

The three systems

1. Catalog + votes — the card catalog itself (Card/Source models, Elasticsearch-backed search) plus the weighted-vote consensus system layered on it: printing tags, artist attribution, and general tags, each resolved from anonymous, machine, and moderator votes against source-weighted thresholds. See features/printing-tags.md and upstreaming/vote-system.md.
2. Identification pipeline — the methodology for turning an ambiguous, self-reported card name into one specific printing: OCR, perceptual-hash clustering, deductive backfill, and fallback engines, each contributing weighted votes into the consensus system above. The formal write-up of why this is sound (false-accept bound, prior-art comparison, soundness mechanisms) is theory.md — reviewed and approved by the owner, written for exactly this kind of external reader. features/catalog-completion-plan.md is the live, in-progress build log for this pipeline's current work.
3. Print tooling — the deck-building editor, XML/PDF/decklist export, and the print-shop hand-off pages (NotMPC, PringlePrints) that turn a finished project into an actual order. See features/pdf-generator.md, features/print-export-page.md, features/google-drive-connect.md, features/image-cdn.md.

A fourth piece sits adjacent to all three rather than being its own system: moderation (Discord OAuth login, a Moderators group gating sensitive-tag approval and catalog cleanup) is built on top of the vote-consensus system above it, not separate from it — see features/moderation.md.

Where the formal methodology lives

theory.md is the single most load-bearing doc for understanding why the identification pipeline's crowd- and machine-derived consensus can be trusted. It's written to stand alone, with minimal repo-internal jargon, specifically because it doubles as the technical annex for federation-v1.md's cross-instance verdict-exchange pitch — the reason this page exists is that theory.md is the link handed to a reader with no other context on this fork.

Everything else

README.md indexes the rest of this directory by audience — understanding the system, operating it, plans & proposals, and records.