Paper-Rank is a simple tool written in Rust to organize topics of recurrent meetings with ongoing elections. It is designed to decide on papers for a recurring meeting discussing current research topics but is not specific to this particular use case and should be easy to adopt to other applications.

This tool started as a fork of jonhoo/vote.rs but is now standalone due to many changes including:

• Update to Rocket 0.5 with full async functionality
• User login with passwords to avoid spam using bcrypt-pbkdf, including password change feature and register feature for new users
• Markdown editor using the Comrak crate for CommonMark-Support to let users add items (images and raw html are filtered)
• History site, where old entries are archived
• Pin upcoming topics to make them unvotable but still show them to all users
• Dockerfile and docker-compose for easy deployment
• small admin page to edit items and change the dates

As the original version jonhoo/vote.rs, this tool uses ranked choice voting using LivingInSyn/rcir.

The basic idea is that users rank the available items according to their preference and the final election is run before each meeting to determine the topic. Since ranked choice voting lets users specify multiple preferences, this process can then be repeated for the next meeting, where it will go to each user's second preferred candidate, etc.

To deploy, the sqlite db has to be initialized using:

$ sqlite3 db/db.sqlite < schema.sql
$ cargo run --release

Change Rocket.toml according to your needs. It contains a default value for secret_key which should be changed using openssl rand -base64 32 as described here. The key can either be set in the Rocket.toml or in a file with the name .env and the key ROCKET_SECRET_KEY if you want to use the docker-compose.yml file.

Afterwards run the application:

$ cargo run --release

or using the docker image

$ docker-compose up -d

The web interface will now be available on port 8000.

Users must register using the icon in the top right corner and must be approved by using the cli tool:

prankctl users approve <id>

where a user id can be found using

prankctl users list --all

For other commands see

prankctl --help

Admins can be added using:

prankctl users admin <id>

Items can be added by every user using the button New Item in the navigation bar.

Pinning a topic before the event should be done by using the site /show (only available to admins). An item can be edited by clicking the edit button and then changing the date and emailed using the email button.

The cli tool can also be used using

prankctl items discuss-on <id> <date>

or

prankctl items cancel-discuss <id>

All items where discussed_on is NULL (or unset) remain voteble. The item will display at the top of the start page and at the top of the voting page until the date is reached (using UTC timezone) and only one item will be shown if multiple items have a date in the future (the item with a date that is "further away").