Commonts: A Forum Run by Its Members

[!NOTE]

Executive Overview

Attribute	Details
Status	Locked demo live at commonts.com since September 2026: seeded personas only, no sign-ups or uploads, reset nightly. Formerly "Forumnia".
What It Is	"Comments, in a commons": communities whose rules belong to their members, with moderation that does not rely on a few moderators as the last line of defence.
Core Problem & Solution	Forums fail either by tolerating contempt or by moderators deleting disagreement. Commonts screens posts for incivility before publication, offers the author a rewrite that keeps their point, puts what remains behind a curtain, and sends disputes to a jury of members.
Tech Stack	TypeScript monorepo (API, worker, Vite web app), PostgreSQL 16, Drizzle ORM, OpenAPI, Google Cloud Run, Playwright
Key Highlights	Civility curtain, member juries with appeals and a public moderation log, Helpful-based ordering with no downvote, volunteer moderators removable by their community, phone-first UI.

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1. The mechanics

• Civility curtain. A creation check screens each post. Contempt goes behind a curtain where it stands, with an automatic jury case; doxxing, threats and illegal content are held before publication for trust and safety. If both civility models are down, a post goes up at once and is reviewed afterwards rather than held.
• Rewrites that keep the point. The suggested rewrite removes the insult but not the argument: a sneer at a comment becomes "your comment is not defensible". Disputed calls go to a stronger model, and a bias set of plain-versus-polished pairs with a measured miss rate guards against penalising plain writing.
• Juries. Five members see a case together with the community and its rules. Replacement jurors are drawn under a per-community cap (a real bug: a panel could otherwise come entirely from one community). Sanctions can be appealed, and every action lands in a public moderation log.
• Ordering without a downvote. Ordering is Helpful normalised by viewers. Disagree only changes labels, computed from three counts (Helpful, Disagree, pressed both) and never from a model. An earlier bridging model was deleted once it was clear that pressing both buttons gamed it.
• Moderators answer to members. Volunteer moderators can be removed for inactivity, by team vote or by community recall. Locked principles are separate from tunable parameters, which are set with a published reason.

2. Engineering

• Locked demo. DEMO_MODE forces vendor fakes, closes sign-ups and uploads, and a Cloud Run job reseeds nightly. A test runs the seeded content through the creation check, because the first seed filed insults as abuse reports and contradicted the design.
• Identity, server-side. Phone sign-up behind attestation, rate limits, mobile-only number lookup and a spend cap, all on the server, since a client-side SMS SDK cannot stop SMS pumping.
• Images gated. Image uploads are production-gated on hash matching and abuse reporting being in place.
• Isolation for tests. End-to-end runs get their own database and ports after one run wiped the shared development database.
• Tests. Shared, API, vendor-client and Playwright suites (about 300 tests).
• Media harness. A tour in phone and desktop cuts with a presenter, four member-perspective shorts, sixty social cards and an animated logo, all rendered from the production build over a dedicated seed.

3. Stack

Component	Technology
API and worker	Node.js, TypeScript, OpenAPI
Web	Vite SPA, Markdown, two themes (Daylight and Instrument)
Data	PostgreSQL 16, Drizzle ORM
Hosting	Google Cloud Run (scale to zero), Cloud Run Jobs and Scheduler for the nightly reset
Testing	Unit and API suites, Playwright end to end