Creative Community @ VVITU

A comprehensive platform designed for the Creative Community club at VVITU. The platform serves as the center for student activities, managing attendance, resources, internal notifications, and member registration. It features a robust, secure backend and a retro-futuristic, "hacker-themed" user interface.

🚀 Features

• Secure Member Authentication & Management: Role-based access control (Admin/Member) with specialized dashboards.
• Hardware-Level Ban Enforcement: Advanced fingerprinting (canvas + hardware metrics) paired with a server-side IP firewall blocks malicious users across refreshes, incognito modes, and Cloudflare layers.
• Live Attendance Checking: Real-time polling with an active countdown for club checking mechanisms.
• Resource Vault: A curated library of links, GitHub repositories, and tools for students with GitHub API integration for stars and forks.
• Dynamic Profile Avatars: Users can upload and customize their PFPs.

🛠 Tech Stack

• Backend: Python 3.10+, Flask, Waitress/Gunicorn (for prod).
• Database: MySQL / MariaDB (via mysql-connector-python).
• Frontend: Vanilla JS (ES6+), CSS3 with Custom Variables, HTML5.
• Infrastructure Context: Specifically built to run behind Cloudflare and within Pterodactyl container environments.

💻 Getting Started (Local Development)

1. Prerequisites

• Python 3.8 or higher
• MySQL / MariaDB installed and running.
• pip

2. Installation Setup

1. Clone the repository:

   git clone https://github.com/your-org/creative-community.git
   cd creative-community

2. Create a virtual environment and install dependencies:

   python -m venv venv
   source venv/bin/activate  # Or `venv\Scripts\activate` on Windows
   pip install Flask mysql-connector-python requests python-dotenv

3. Configure Environment Variables:

   • Copy the example config: cp .env.example .env
   • Edit .env to match your local database instance.
   • Define your ADMIN_* variables. The first time the server boots, it will use these settings to auto-generate the root Administrator account.

3. Running the Server

Run the Flask application:

python app.py

Note: The application defaults to port 10018. Visit http://127.0.0.1:10018/creative-community/ to view the site.

🔒 Security Architecture

This application employs a highly aggressive auto-banning mechanism targeting malicious inspectors (e.g., users trying to bypass the client flow using Ctrl+U or F12).

1. Frontend Fingerprinting: main.js generates an immutable hardware/canvas fingerprint (getDeviceId()).
2. Event Listeners: Context menus and common inspector hotkeys are blocked. Triggering them executes a POST to /api/security/block.
3. Database Logging: Both the generated Device ID and the real client IP (via CF-Connecting-IP / X-Forwarded-For) are saved.
4. Server Intercept: The core Flask app uses an @app.before_request hook (check_ip_ban()) to intercept and drop requests matching the banned IPs, falling back to Device ID checks if the IP floats.

If you lock yourself out locally, remove your IP/ID from the blocked_devices table.