Social Platforms & Forums
Realistic community data for testing
The Social Platform Challenge
Building Stack Overflow, Reddit, or Discourse? You need:
- Rich content: Markdown, code snippets, formatted text
- Realistic voting: Power-law distributions (few posts get most upvotes)
- Reputation systems: Badges, karma, trust levels
- Edit history: Audit trails for moderation
- Temporal logic: Comments after posts, edits after creation
Why Aphelion?
📝 Rich Content Generation
- Markdown: Headers, lists, links, emphasis
- Code snippets: JavaScript, Python, Java, SQL
- Syntax highlighting: Language-aware
- Realistic question/answer structure
⬆️ Voting & Reputation
- Power-law votes: Top 1% gets 50% of upvotes
- Reputation calc: +10 upvote, +15 accepted
- Badge engine: Gold/silver/bronze
- Realistic user activity patterns
🕒 Temporal Consistency
- Comments: Always after parent post
- Edits: Chronological history
- Votes: After post creation
- Realistic time gaps
Real Example: Stack Exchange Clone
aphelion generate examples/stack-exchange/schema.json \
--rows 100000 \
--seed 42Generated Content:
Question: "How do I implement async/await in JavaScript?"
async function fetchData() {
const response = await fetch('/api/data');
return response.json();
}Tags: javascript, async-await, promises
Votes: +42 | Views: 1,234 | Answers: 3
Result: 100K questions, 300K answers, 1M votes, realistic distributions
Supported Platforms
Stack Exchange / Stack Overflow
- ✅ Questions, answers, comments
- ✅ Voting, reputation, badges
- ✅ Tags, favorites, bookmarks
- ✅ Edit history, close votes
Reddit / Discourse
- ✅ Posts, comments, threads
- ✅ Karma, awards, flairs
- ✅ Subreddits, categories
- ✅ Moderation, reports
Use Cases
- Testing search: Full-text search with realistic content
- Performance: Load testing with power-law vote distributions
- Moderation tools: Test flagging, reporting, banning
- Recommendation engines: Train on realistic user behavior