cs50

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🧠 What is CrowdFAQ?

CrowdFAQ is a full-stack community-driven FAQ platform built as a CS50x Final Project. Students ask questions, the community answers, and an AI assistant powered by Google Gemini enriches responses with intelligent summaries — creating a self-improving knowledge base for academic and professional growth. Think of it as Stack Overflow meets Reddit, tailored for students.

🧑 Student asks a question ↓ 💬 Community answers ↓ 🔐 Admin verifies best answer ↓ 🤖 Gemini generates AI summary ↓ 🏅 Badges & reputation earned ↓ 📚 Knowledge base grows

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✨ Features

🏠 Landing & Discovery

• Dynamic landing page with real-time database statistics
• Animated floating gradient orbs on the landing page
• Trending FAQ categories with live question counts
• Category shortcuts from the landing page to filtered FAQs

🎨 UI / UX

• Fixed responsive header with FAQ search + search highlighting
• Dark mode and light mode support
• Infinite scroll on FAQ feed (IntersectionObserver)
• Heart-shaped upvote buttons on answers and comments
• Sticky footer layout across all pages
• Fully mobile-responsive layout

🔐 Authentication & Profiles

• Student registration and login with JWT authentication
• Admin login and protected moderation dashboard
• Password reset via email (forgot/reset flow)
• Email verification on registration
• Brute-force protection — lockout after 5 failed attempts
• User profiles with bio, reputation, branch, and semester
• Saved FAQ bookmarks and Followed FAQs on profile
• Follow and unfollow student profiles
• Private follower and following lists

📋 FAQ Management

• FAQ creation with categories, tags, company, role, branch, and semester
• Anonymous FAQ posting support
• Similar-question suggestions before posting
• Tag autocomplete with usage-based sorting
• Search FAQs by title, description, or tags
• Filter FAQs by category, company, role, and status
• Sort by latest, most answered, most upvoted, or unanswered
• Full FAQ detail page with views, tags, and AI summary
• FAQ upvotes, downvotes, bookmarks, follows, shares, and reports
• Edit history for all FAQs (append-only log)
• Question merge for duplicate FAQs
• Feature/pin important FAQs

💬 Answers & Interactions

• Answers with anonymous posting support
• Answer upvotes, downvotes, comments, mentions, and reports
• Comment likes (heart toggle)
• Edit history for all answers
• Users cannot answer or comment on their own FAQs
• FAQ owners can accept admin-verified best answers
• Reputation changes on accept (+25 / -25)
• Users can delete their own unverified answers
• Verified answer deletion requires admin action

🏅 Gamification

• Reputation ladder: 10→comment, 25→upvote, 50→downvote, 100→flag
• Leaderboard — top 50 contributors by reputation
• Badge system with 8 badges (auto-awarded on login/question/answer)
  • First Steps, Curious Mind, Helping Hand, Top Contributor
  • Rising Star, Expert, Popular Answer, Frequently Bookmarked
• Trending questions weighted by votes + recency

🤖 AI Features (Google Gemini)

• Automatic AI summaries generated from verified answers
• AI summaries refresh after verification, unverification, or deletion
• AI chatbot grounded in verified community answers
• Floating chatbot helper with personalized greeting

🔔 Notifications

• Notifications for answers, mentions, accepted answers, FAQ activity, and followers
• Duplicate prevention — unique index on (recipient, type, faq, answer)
• Optional email notifications via SMTP
• Unread count badge on navbar

🛡️ Moderator & Admin

• Moderator role — close/reopen FAQs, edit any FAQ, review reports queue
• Admin dashboard with stats, user/FAQ/answer/report management
• Admin user banning, unbanning, and deletion (with content cleanup)
• Admin answer verification, unverification, and convert-to-comment
• Admin FAQ pinning, closing, reopening, merging, and deletion
• Report review, dismissal, escalate, and content removal
• Edit history browsing for all content

🛡️ Security

• Helmet — HTTP security headers
• express-rate-limit — rate limiting per endpoint
• express-mongo-sanitize — NoSQL injection prevention
• zod — request body validation on all POST/PATCH routes
• Input sanitization — strips XSS, javascript: URLs, on-event handlers
• Brute-force protection — temporary 15-min lockout after 5 failures
• CSP headers configured via Helmet

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🛠️ Tech Stack

🎨 Frontend

⚙️ Backend

🔧 Tools

Frontend  →  React 18 + Vite 6 + React Router DOM v7 + Lucide Icons
Backend   →  Node.js + Express 4 + MongoDB (Mongoose) + JWT + bcryptjs
AI        →  Google Gemini 2.5 Flash
Validation → zod
Testing   →  Vitest + mongodb-memory-server
Dev DX    →  Concurrently + Vite HMR + node --watch

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🚀 Quick Start

Prerequisites

node >= 18.x
npm  >= 9.x
MongoDB Atlas account (or local MongoDB instance)
Google Gemini API key

1️⃣ Clone the Repository

git clone https://github.com/aavesh-k/cs50.git
cd cs50

2️⃣ Install Dependencies

npm install

3️⃣ Configure Environment Variables

cp .env.example .env

Open .env and fill in your values — refer to .env.example for all required fields. Keep your credentials private and never commit .env to version control.

4️⃣ Launch the App

# Starts both API server and frontend simultaneously
npm run dev:all

Service	URL
🌐 Frontend	http://127.0.0.1:5174
🔌 API Server	http://localhost:3000

Tip: You can also run them separately using npm run dev (frontend) and npm run dev:server (backend).

5️⃣ Run Tests

npm test

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📁 Project Structure

cs50/
├── server/                # Express.js API server
│   ├── config/            # DB connection, env vars
│   ├── models/            # Mongoose schemas (10 models)
│   ├── routes/            # API route handlers
│   ├── middleware/        # Auth, rate-limit, validator, brute-force
│   ├── services/          # Email, AI, notifications, badges, reputation
│   └── utils/             # Helpers, response wrapper
│
├── src/                   # React frontend (Vite)
│   ├── pages/             # Route-level page components
│   ├── features/          # Feature-specific (faq, answer, auth, admin)
│   ├── components/        # Reusable UI (layout, common, ui)
│   ├── hooks/             # Custom hooks (useToast, useDebounced)
│   └── utils/             # Helpers (time, string, constants, highlight)
│
├── tests/                 # Vitest test suites
├── index.html
├── package.json
├── .env.example
├── .gitignore
└── LICENSE

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🤝 Contributing

All contributions are welcome!

# 1. Fork the repository
# 2. Create your feature branch
git checkout -b feature/YourFeature

# 3. Commit your changes
git commit -m "Add: YourFeature"

# 4. Push to the branch
git push origin feature/YourFeature

# 5. Open a Pull Request

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📜 License

Distributed under the MIT License — see LICENSE for details.

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_{This was CS50x — and this is CrowdFAQ.}