Project Vote: I Vote Lincoln!

Project Vote is a web application written with Django that was used as the realtime Q&A tool for a company wide event named "Town Hall". This event took place on 16th December 2018 with an audience of 3,000 people. See the Key Features section below for an overview.

Prerequisites

• Python 3+ (see requirements.txt file)
• Django 2.1.4+
• Gunicorn 19.9.0+ (only for deployment)
• Nginx 1.14.2+ (only for deployment)

How to Run (Development)

1. Install all the dependencies (e.g. pip install -r requirements.txt).
2. Run the django development server via cd vote && python manage.py runserver.
3. Launch a browser and connect to the server (e.g. 127.0.0.1:8000).
4. To get past the login page, create a new session ID by creating a new user account in the backend. Note: The username will be the session ID, while the password is currently is hardcoded to 'defaultuser' (the password is not used, only the session ID!)
   • python manage.py migrate
   • python manage.py createsuperuser # IMPORTANT: Username=<SESSION_ID>, password=defaultuser

Q&A Flow

1. A user logs into the frontend webpage via a given session ID.
2. The user can view existing questions.
3. The user can post a new question if not already asked.
4. The submitted question is first sent to the backend.
5. Moderators access the backend via /admin.
6. The moderator can control the following flags per question:
   • isAppropriate flag: Appear on frontend?
   • isAnswered flag: Change question color to green on frontend?
   • votes: An internal ranking of questions to help moderation.

Key Features

• Authentication: Requires logging via session ID.
• Realtime Q&A: Allows posting and viewing of moderated questions.
• Moderation: Questions posted are sent to backend for moderation first.
• Capacity: ~2,000 clients.

Note: The bottleneck of the web application is the authentication page which can only support 2,000 HTTP requests within 1 minute (tested with Gunicorn and Nginx). Other pages support more than 10,000 HTTP requests per minute.

As a reference, the django development server can support around 1500 clients (though it is ill advised to use the development server for production! Use Nginx with Gunicorn instead).

Authors

• Othman Alikhan
• See About page for more details.