waqasbhatti / astroph-coffee

A small Tornado webapp to review and vote on astro-ph papers

astroph-coffee - A simple platform for astro-ph arXiv discussion

This server helps organize astro-ph discussion by providing a way for people to see local papers and vote on papers they want to talk about. It has the following components:

• backend with arxiv scraping
• article abstract and metadata storage in sqlite3
• frontend built with tornado for viewing and voting on papers
• an archive of previous astro-ph discussions
• geofencing (and IP-address fencing) using the Maxmind GeoLite2 database to restrict voting locations
• reserving papers for later discussion (up to a week after their appearance)
• full-text search for paper titles, abstract titles, and author names

See the INSTALL.md file for instructions on how to install and run the server. If you have questions or problems, please open an issue or drop me an email.

How it works

Everyone gets five votes to use in total per day, with one per paper. In addition, everyone may reserve up to five papers for later discussion. The server generally operates in two modes:

1. Vote mode: this is active whenever the voting period is active (defined in src/conf/astroph.conf). Papers are shown in their serial number order as on the astro-ph list page, and users can vote on papers they'd like to see talked about. Users can also reserve papers during the voting period for up to seven days if they want to talk about the papers at a later discussion session.

   

2. Display mode: this is active outside the voting period. Local papers are highlighted at the top of the page with their full abstracts. Papers with at least one vote are shown below papers with local authors, in order of the number of votes they received. Reserved papers are shown next in reversed-order of their original arXiv appearance. Finally, all other papers are listed below the local, voted, and reserved papers.

   

An archive of all paper abstracts is also provided in reverse chronological order, grouped by month and year to make it easy to see what people were interested in talking about on previous days.

astroph-coffee's Issues

coffeeserver should email people when their paper is up

• will need to make sure all email addresses are up to date in the tables
• do this only for local people, no one in the 'department affiliate' list

add the cross-listed papers to the paper listings

They've been fetched automatically since forever, but haven't been put into the listings.

coffeeserver should indicate department affiliate papers with a special notation

• this will probably be some sort of background shading

add FTS for articles using sqlite3 fts4

This will add external dependencies, so it'll be optional.

EDIT: we'll use sqlite3 fts4 instead, so no elasticsearch required for the moment.

add persistent flash message ability from python repl

would help in cases where arxiv doesn't update for whatever reason (like tonight)