mement0o / antilope

Antilope is a real life private tracker, allowing members to share anything inside communities

Antilope

Antilope is the name of this Sharable Network Tracker.

Alternatives names could be Argali or Urial as it refers to Gazelle, the main inspiration dor this project.

This is'nt an app, but a tool allowing people to create their own networks and setting them up for each use case. Checkout the requirements to set up your own instance on a server.

It's built using PHP 7 with Symfony 5 framework and Bootstrap 4 toolkit.

Concept

The whole idea behind Antilope, is to transpose the private tracker system to anything else but torrents. Sharables are the key concept of Antilope : they are a the unit of what you can share.

The classic question is : What can be shared through this system ?

And the classic answer is : what would you share ?

In fact, there are no categories defining what sould or should not be a sharable. The only limitation of what can be shared or not is your imagination! Sharables are only defineed by a set of parameters (place, date, consumability...) that are all optionnals. Sharables are "managed" by at least one user. Those managers can precisely define how they relate to the sharable and how they want to manage it.

Antilope is designed to encourage the creation of small scale networks instead of massive ones. The main goals are :

• to increase trust between users instead of violents rating system.
• have the possibility to gamify life interactions.
• have an half self-managed, half moderated user management.

References

• Case study of private trackers as a solution of freeriding in peertopeer networks
• Description of the private tracker word in a Linux Wiki

How it works

Create a sharable

When you create a sharable you can setup a lot of meta infos :

• name
• description
• details (markdown)
• begin date (optionnal)
• end date (optionnal)
• place* (optionnal)
• resspossibility (if managers are responsible for what is shared)
• consumability* (if the sharable is something that can only be shared a certain amount of times)
• visibility (optionnal : above which user class does users can access the sharable)
• contact method (see Managing and contact method)

*: todo

Managing and contact method

There can be any number of user managing the same sharable, that way, they will all recieve the same amount of share points during validation process.

Every sharable must choose for a contact method between this four strategies :

1. no contact info are related to the sharable
2. automatic : when an user is interested by a sharable, contact infos are exchanged.
3. manual : when an user is interested by a sharable, contact infos are exchanged after interested users have been manualy reviewed by a manager.
4. never : Only interested user contact infos are send to managers.

The methods go from less protection to maximum managers protection. As you are sharing, you are always able to be more protected.

Search and Discover

Depending on how user classes have been set up, users can search through the database of sharable using differents views :

• list search
• map*
• calendar*

*: todo

Interest

First step to benefit from a sharable is to indicate that you're interested, afterwhat, depending on the sharable contact method, contact infos are exchanged.

Validation

The validation system is there to avoid violent rating system. As you can only validate a sharable and add a message like in a guestbook, you can only express criticism using words. You can't just put a 1/5 stars without explaining why.

Validation can only occurs after being interested in a sharable and that contact infos have been exchanged.

But if there is a real problem with a sharable, user could report it. Depending on the report subject, this will be handled by the managers or moderators.*

*: todo

User Class system

The most efficient way to increase gamification in a network is to implement an user class system. In Antilope admins can set up any user classes wanted from rank 0 to 100. They allow or disallow users to share or access sharable, invite users... And they can be triggered by many parameters such as the share score, account age, number of validations given...

Share Score

The share score is the system that try to give an indication of how much an user has participate in the network. Unlike private trackers, that can precisely mesure torrents ratio, it's impossible and absurd to have a correct quantification of how much have been shared between users. But still, share score is there as the only indicator possible, and can be used for user class promotions, this is how it works :

Every time an user validate a Sharable, every user managing it win a amount of points, based on :

• validating user rank (higher user rank give more points)
• the amount of validation already given for this sharable (first validations give more points)
• divided by the number of managers

Interface

Setup

Requirements

For now, is only way to install an Antilope app is via Symfony and composer.

• Apache
• PHP 7
• MySQL

Development

Run checks

composer check

Run the dev server

bin/console server:start

Generate migrations for sqlite

bin/console doctrine:migrations:diff --db-configuration sqlite