BidaAngMamayan

BIDA ANG MAMAMAYAN — a public supporter tribute news desk for Senator Bam Aquino, the gamer of the Philippine Senate and champion of college students, scholarships, and fair electricity.

Forked from the Forthena architecture (Next.js + Mongo + an RSS crawler), retargeted to follow ONE subject and stripped of everything a private paper needs but a public tribute does not: no login, no accounts, no like/dislike, no per-reader AI.

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What it is

• A live news crawl (every 15 min, PM2 cron) that follows every story on the Philippine wire that names Sen. Bam Aquino, plus a quiet-day fallback to general PH wires. A relevance gate drops the senator's name from unrelated copy — only genuine BAM stories print.
• A yellow/gamer visual motif (Orbitron + Rajdhani + JetBrains Mono, CRT scanlines, an XP-bar edition meter, a scrolling BAM-wire ticker, a neon "LIVE DESK" HUD) — because the senator is a gamer.
• A public community board — "Thank you, Senator BAM" — visitors post with a nickname only (no account, no email). Light abuse controls: per-IP rate limit, hard content caps, markup stripping, URL-only rejection.
• An in-page reader drawer that lifts the full article body server-side (Readability) so a story can be read without leaving the site, with an honest "read at source" fallback when a publisher blocks us.
• A disclaimer, always visible (masthead + footer): the site is run by supporters and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated by the senator or his office.

The seven desks

BAM Front (lead, named-BAM) · Education · Energy & Electricity · Gamer's Corner · The Senate Floor · The Philippines · World.

Stack

Next.js 15 (React 19, App Router, plain CSS — no Tailwind in the UI), MongoDB 7.0, PM2, nginx + Let's Encrypt. No LLM in the runtime path — ranking is deterministic (named → fresh → photo). The Forthena llmrouter dependency was removed entirely.

Run locally

npm install
# point at a Mongo (defaults to mongodb://127.0.0.1:27017/bama)
npm run build
npm start          # :3000

Tests:

bash tests/run-all.sh                                  # self-contained (no Mongo)
MONGODB_URI=mongodb://127.0.0.1:27099/bama node tests/board-test.mjs
node tests/e2e-run.mjs                                 # boots the built app on :4003

Deploy (manual — no CI, by owner order)

Target box: 66.181.46.132, domain bidaangmamamayan.com (apex + www).

1. On the box, /var/www/bama holds the source. .env.production lives only on the box (never rsync it): MONGODB_URI, CRON_SECRET.
2. rsync -az --delete --exclude node_modules --exclude .next --exclude .git --exclude '.env*' ./ root@66.181.46.132:/var/www/bama/
3. On the box: cd /var/www/bama && npm ci && npm run build && pm2 reload bama
4. Crawl tick is PM2 app bama-crawl (*/15 * * * * → POST /api/crawl with x-bama-cron=$CRON_SECRET). First edition appears within ~15 min; fire one crawl by hand to seed it immediately.
5. TLS: certbot --nginx -d bidaangmamamayan.com -d www.bidaangmamamayan.com (nginx is already configured for both; the 443 block is live once the cert exists). Auto-renewal timer is armed by certbot.

Mongo note: the box runs kernel 7.0 (Ubuntu 26.04) where Mongo 8.x is broken (8.0 refuses the kernel, 8.2 SIGSEGVs). MongoDB 7.0 from the jammy channel is the working version — installed at provision time.

Files that matter

path	role
lib/sources.js	the BAM query registry + Bing feed helpers
lib/crawl.js	crawler + relevance gate (bamRelevance)
lib/categories.js	the 7-desk registry (single source of truth)
lib/feed.js	public edition: deterministic rank, desk headlines, stats
lib/article.js	reader extraction (Readability + honest fallbacks)
lib/board.js	community board: caps, sanitise, rate limit
app/page.js	the whole front-end (client SPA: views + reader drawer)
app/globals.css	the yellow/gamer theme
ecosystem.config.cjs	PM2 apps (bama, bama-crawl)

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A fan project. Bida ang Mamamayan. 🎮