Monero User Forum

A privacy-first discussion forum for Monero users — price talk, technical help, and general discussion. No email required, works over Tor, and self-hostable.

Live: monerouserforum.com · part of the Monerica network.

Features

• Accounts without email — sign up with a username + a one-time access key (no email, optional email only for self-service password reset).
• Admin-gated membership — new accounts are approved by an admin before they can post.
• Threads & categories, @mentions, replies, thread subscriptions, and in-app notifications (no email).
• Private messages with a two-pane messenger, and a real-time chatroom (SignalR with WebSocket → SSE → long-polling fallback, so it works over Tor).
• Moderation — ban (posts blacked out), censor a post and its replies (or a whole thread), and a report → admin review queue for spam and problem posts.
• Reputation levels, per-thread unique view counts (cookie-based, no IP logging).
• Bunny.net image storage for avatars, with an on-disk fallback for local dev.
• Hardened by default: strict Content-Security-Policy, output encoding + HTML sanitisation on all user content, antiforgery on every mutation.

Tech stack

• ASP.NET Core MVC (.NET 10), Razor views
• Entity Framework Core + PostgreSQL (Npgsql)
• ASP.NET Core Identity (username-based)
• SignalR for the real-time chatroom
• Markdig + HtmlSanitizer for safe post rendering

Local development

Requirements: .NET 10 SDK and a local PostgreSQL.

# 1) Create a local database (defaults below match appsettings.json)
#    Host=localhost;Port=5432;Database=monerouserforum;Username=postgres;Password=postgres

# 2) Run — EF migrations are applied automatically on startup
dotnet run --project src/MoneroUserForum.Web

The app listens on the URLs in src/MoneroUserForum.Web/Properties/launchSettings.json. Without Bunny configured, uploaded images fall back to wwwroot/uploads/.

Configuration & secrets

No secrets are committed to this repo. The values in appsettings.json are empty placeholders or local-dev defaults; real values are supplied via environment variables in production (double-underscore maps to config sections):

Setting	Env var	Notes
Database	ConnectionStrings__Default	Postgres connection string
Bunny storage zone	BunnyStorage__StorageZoneName	leave empty to use on-disk storage
Bunny write key	BunnyStorage__AccessKey
Bunny read key	BunnyStorage__ReadKey
Bunny CDN base URL	BunnyStorage__CdnBaseUrl	e.g. https://<zone>.b-cdn.net
Data-protection key path	DataProtection__KeyRingPath	persist keys across redeploys
Seed admin username	Seed__AdminUsername	first-run admin bootstrap
Seed admin password	Seed__AdminPassword

In the reference deployment these live in a root-only /etc/monerouserforum/db.env loaded by the systemd unit — never in the repo. .gitignore is configured to keep *.env, appsettings.Production.json, key files, and the data-protection key ring out of version control.

Project layout

src/
  MoneroUserForum.Data      — entities, DbContext, EF migrations
  MoneroUserForum.Services  — storage, notifications, reputation, text/markup
  MoneroUserForum.Web       — controllers, views, hubs, wwwroot
CI/deploy.sh                — publish + deploy to the reference host

License

No license has been chosen yet — see the repository owner.