AnonBoard

AnonBoard is a small Flask web service for classroom Q&A. Students can register an anonymous nickname and password, then submit timestamped questions through HTTP Basic authentication. Teachers can open a dedicated dashboard, inspect all submitted questions, and mark each one as answered or pending.

The project is intentionally didactical:

• Flask backend with a small app factory
• In-memory storage isolated behind a clear Python repository API
• REST endpoints for registration and question management
• OpenAPI specification in the project root
• Minimal HTML, CSS, and vanilla JavaScript frontend
• Pytest coverage for the backend behavior

Features

• Student registration via REST: nickname + password
• Credential verification via REST without backend sessions
• Question submission via authenticated REST requests
• Public paginated question listing with author, timestamp, and answered mark
• Teacher-only state updates for answered or pending questions
• Admin account configurable through command-line arguments or environment variables
• Two frontend views: student page and teacher page

Project layout

anonboard/
  cli.py          CLI launcher for the backend
  store.py        In-memory repository and domain records
  ws.py           Flask app factory and HTTP routes
  templates/      HTML pages served by Flask
  static/         CSS and JavaScript assets
    openapi.yaml  Reverse-engineered OpenAPI specification
tests/
  test_ws.py

API summary

• POST /api/register

  Body: {"nickname": "alice", "password": "secret"}

• POST /api/users/check

  Body: {"nickname": "alice", "password": "secret"}

• GET /api/questions

  Public endpoint returning questions sorted from newest to oldest

  Query parameters: page defaults to 1, limit defaults to 25, backend cap is 1000

• POST /api/questions

  Basic auth required, body: {"text": "Will this be on the exam?"}

• PATCH /api/questions/<id>

  Admin Basic auth required, body: {"answered": true}

Question payloads contain:

• id
• text
• author
• timestamp
• answered

The complete reverse-engineered API description is available in anonboard/static/openapi.yaml.

Run locally

Install dependencies:

poetry install

Launch the backend with explicit admin credentials:

python -m anonboard --admin-nickname teacher --admin-password secret

Or configure the admin via environment variables:

export ANONBOARD_ADMIN_NICKNAME=teacher
export ANONBOARD_ADMIN_PASSWORD=secret
python -m anonboard

Open these pages in the browser:

• http://127.0.0.1:5000/ for the teacher dashboard
• http://127.0.0.1:5000/ask for the student page

The OpenAPI specification is served by GET /api using HTTP content negotiation:

• Default (browser / Accept: text/html): a Swagger-like rendered documentation page
• Accept: application/json: raw JSON OpenAPI document
• Accept: application/yaml (or application/x-yaml, text/yaml): raw YAML OpenAPI document

Test suite

Run the backend tests with:

pytest