Chan Forum
A serverless anonymous forum running on the Cloudflare edge. Built with React, Hono, Workers, and D1 in a monorepo with shared schema.
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The problem
Traditional forums require accounts, passwords, and personal information. For lightweight campus discussion, that friction kills participation. I wanted a space where people could share ideas without the overhead of identity management.
Technical approach
- Monorepo with shared TypeScript schema between frontend and backend, ensuring type safety across the stack.
- Hono on Cloudflare Workers handles API routing with minimal cold start. D1 (SQLite at the edge) stores posts with zero database server management.
- React frontend deployed on Cloudflare Pages. The entire stack runs serverless with no traditional servers to maintain.
- Content moderation through rate limiting and simple spam filters, balancing openness with basic safety.
Running at the edge
There is no origin server. Each request is handled by a Cloudflare Worker in a data center near the reader, and the frontend ships from Cloudflare Pages.
Close to every reader
Hono keeps API routes light enough to start in milliseconds, while D1 stores posts without a database server to run.
Locations on the globe are illustrative.