TTG Wiki BBS

The Teletype Games wiki over telnet: it browses this wiki live through its JSON API, arranging the pages into pageable, searchable BBS menus. A supervisor login also opens the private pages.

Live at teletypegames.org:2325, in the browser on bbsweb, and through TTG Gate BBS

Overview

A Ruby app on the rubbs gem, like the Teletype BBS. It has its own repository, bbs/wiki-bbs, and its own stack, and reads the wiki over the interstack network. It has two faces on one port. A call starts with rubbs' BBS::Terminal question: the board waits up to 1.5 seconds for the telnet answers, and a window wider than 40 columns is a modern terminal; 40 columns, or no answer at all (a C64 behind a WiFi modem speaks plain TCP), is taken for a Commodore. 1 picks the modern face, 2 the C64, RETURN takes the guess.

The modern face

A full-screen, Norton Commander-style two-pane browser: the page tree on the left (indented by route depth), the selected page rendered as ANSI markdown on the right. The browser opens maximized; F5 / Alt-Enter turns it into a window and back.

Pages marked * are private (login-only on the wiki); Wiki > Supervisor login unlocks them, the same item locks them back. The mouse works too (xterm SGR), wheel scroll included.

The C64 face

PETSCII on a 40×25 screen. The same page tree, one level per screen, as a numbered cursor menu of rubbs (BBS::Selector): a page with pages under it is marked >, a private one *. CRSR moves the bar (left and right turn the pages), a typed number lights a page, RETURN opens it or goes down a level, Q (or ←) goes back up. A page is shown a screenful at a time (RETURN: more, Q: back), with its public address at the end. On the top level S is the supervisor login and R re-reads the index.

Data source

Two endpoints of this wiki (templates in themes/ttgwiki2/templates/*.json.twig, pages in pages/custom/):

• GET /custom/sitemap.json — every routable page: route, title, modified, updatedAt, tags, and private (true when the page or an ancestor has access: site.login). No bodies.
• GET /custom/page.json?route=/platforms/tic80 — one page with its markdown and html. A private page needs token= matching the wiki's SUPERVISOR_PASSWORD, otherwise the answer is {"error": "forbidden"}; an unknown route gives {"error": "not_found"}.

The page index is loaded once at boot and shared by every session; F8 (R on the C64) re-reads it for everyone. If the wiki is down at boot (a stack deploy recreates Grav at the same time), the board still starts and retries the index every 10 seconds. Page bodies are cached for 5 minutes.

The lock is enforced on the wiki's side: the Grav entrypoint puts SUPERVISOR_PASSWORD into the site config, and the JSON API refuses private bodies without a matching token. The board sends its WIKI_BBS_SUPERVISOR_PASSWORD as that token, so the two must be the same value; the compose file wires both from one variable.

Under the hood

The code follows the house layout: lib/domain/ (PageModel, WikiRepository, WikiService, SupervisorService, and WikiBBS, the composition root that reads the environment) and lib/ui/ (UI::Modern, the two-pane browser; UI::Petscii with its Browser). The full reference is the repository's README.

The service and the container are wiki-bbs, in /srv/stacks/wiki-bbs, public port 2325. A push to master deploys it from Woodpecker (RuboCop, compose check, ci-deploy wiki-bbs); it reaches Grav as http://wiki-grav, the wiki container's name on interstack. The entrypoint updates rubbs on start. See the BBS Network for the other boards.