// the take
A forum/BBS web app written in Go using the Revel framework, built explicitly as a demo of porting an existing Rails app to Go. It's aimed at Rails developers curious what the same MVC app looks like in Go, not at anyone needing an actual forum.
Controllers/models/views are organized to mirror Rails conventions almost 1:1, which makes it genuinely useful as a side-by-side reference for someone making that jump. Feature set is reasonably complete for a small forum: topics, threaded replies, @mentions, follows, notifications, markdown rendering, pagination. Ships i18n message files (zh-CN and en), so the localization story isn't an afterthought.
Dead since 2017 - pinned to Go 1.3, uses dep (Gopkg.lock/toml) instead of modules, and Revel itself has seen little activity in years, so getting this to build and run on a current Go toolchain will take real work. Operational footprint is heavy for what it is: MySQL, Memcached, and a Node.js/node-sass/coffeescript asset pipeline, all frozen at ancient versions. Test coverage is thin - just two unit test files (markdown, mentionable), nothing covering controllers or the DB layer. Revel is a niche framework choice today versus net/http, chi, or Echo, so time spent learning its conventions here has little transfer value.
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in October 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →