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SciRate is an open source rating and commenting system for arXiv preprints. Papers are upvoted and discussed by the community, and we sometimes play host to more in-depth peer review.

Bug reports and feature requests should be submitted as GitHub issues.

Setting up for development

Development is best done locally using docker compose:

docker compose build

In order to run the app, you will need a local_settings.rb file, and a config/database.yml file. You can copy these from the CI versions:

cp local_settings.rb.ci local_settings.rb
cp config/database.yml.ci config/database.yml

Then, spin up all the servers,

docker compose up -d

You need to make sure elasticsearch is fully up; it can take 10 seconds or so, you can verify with

while true; do sleep 1; curl localhost:9200/_cat/health; done

You can check to make sure something is at localhost:3000. You should see SciRate.

If nothing is there, it's possible something went wrong. One common message is something like A server is already running. Check ... tmp/pids/server.pid. Deleting ./tmp/pids/server.pid fixes this issue.

From here, you can run the tests.

docker compose exec web rspec

After that, you can sync to arXiv.org and then play around with the system locally:

docker compose exec web rake arxiv:feed_import
docker compose exec web rake arxiv:oai_update

and visit http://localhost:3000 and you will be looking at SciRate!

It may not be possible to make new users locally. If you get stuck, you can disable the unless verify_recaptcha code block in app/controllers/users_controller.rb and it should work.

Testing

There is a fairly comprehensive series of unit and integration tests in spec. Running docker compose exec web rspec, if the entire docker compose system is up, will run them.

Deploying

Locally, you can run ./deploy.rb. You will need ssh access to the production server for this to run successfully.

You might need to change the deploy.rb script to point to the public IP address, not web.scirate.com .

On the server, the logs are in /home/scirate/scirate/log/.

Automatic updates

The website updates automatically every hour with a sync.sh script in a crontab on the server. The crontab uses a file lock via flock.

  • It first calls arxiv_paper_sync.rake. This checks if it's the right time to update, and if so, downloads new papers via arxiv_oai_update.rake. This uses the custom arxivsync package.
  • Then it calls arxiv_author_sync.rake. This checks if it's the right time to update, and if so, links the arXiv author identifiers specified by users with the list of papers on arXiv.org via arxiv_authorship_update.rake.

Moderating

In the database, each user (in users) has an account_status column. Change this to admin or moderator for extra powers on the site.

  • Both admins and moderators can hide inflammatory recent comments.
  • Admins can see a dashboard https://scirate.com/admin, set a global alert (i.e. for announcing upcoming site maintenance), and act as other users.
  • A user can also have account_status set to spam.

There is also a feature to lock comments of a paper. This can be done by changing a flag in the database (there is an open issue to make this accessible in the frontend #335).

Acknowledgements

Read the original on github.com ↗