Upvora

Upvora is the feedback portal you'd build for yourself if you had a spare month: a dark-first, dense, modern UI on top of a battle-tested Go + React engine (Fider). Visitors post ideas, vote, and follow every decision through to a public roadmap. Your team triages with drag-and-drop, deliberates in a private layer no visitor ever sees, and scores candidates on a fully custom scorecard. It runs anywhere Docker runs, with a Postgres database as the only dependency, and once it's up, it updates itself from the admin panel.

If you're comparing Canny, UserVoice, Featurebase, Astuto, or Fider itself and want something open-source, self-hosted, and genuinely pretty, this is it.

What you get

🗳️ A feedback board people actually use

Dense, fast, dark-first board with one-click voting straight from the list, optimistic UI, powerful sort tabs (Trending / Most Wanted / Most Discussed / Recent), full-text search with similar-idea detection at post time, tag filters with counts, and rich-text and markdown commenting. Every status gets your color, your name, your rules, including which ones appear on the home page.

📦 Multi-product, single portal

Run every product you own from one place. Products are a lens, not a wall: one member list, one workflow, but every idea carries an ink-bordered product chip, every product gets its own public board at /p/your-product, and every view (board, roadmap, scorecard) filters to any combination of products with shareable ?products= URLs. Unassigned ideas land in a General bucket, never lost.

🗺️ A roadmap worth linking to

Status lanes with per-lane counts, search, tag + product filters as toggle chips, inline voting on cards, and for your team, drag a card between lanes to restatus it. "What's planned?" becomes a URL you paste, not a meeting.

🎯 Prioritization scorecard (team-only)

A committee-style scoring workspace visitors never see: define your own scoring dimensions and your own form fields (nine field types), score candidate ideas against weighted criteria, and read the verdict off an SVG progress ring with your thresholds marked on it. Linked to board ideas, so scores follow the idea.

🔒 Internal notes & comments

The deliberation layer feedback tools forget: internal comments sit inline in the discussion but are visible only to collaborators, excluded from public counts, never emailed to voters. Plus one shared internal note per idea, live-synced between the idea page and the scorecard. Amber-flagged everywhere so nobody mistakes private for public.

📎 Files on ideas, viewed in the board

Besides screenshots, ideas can carry PDF, text and Markdown files (Admin, General; up to 3 attachments, 5 MB each). They open right in the board: PDFs drawn page by page with pdf.js, Markdown through the same sanitizer as descriptions. Every file is checked by its content; every PDF is fully parsed and refused if it holds scripts, launch or form-submit actions, embedded files, XFA forms, multimedia or encryption, and what's stored is the re-written document that was checked. Files are served only to people who can see the idea, with a sandbox that lets nothing run.

🕶️ Private ideas

Sometimes an idea shouldn't be public. Collaborators and admins can mark any idea private (at creation, or with a one-click toggle on an existing one) and it disappears for everyone else on every surface: the board, all lists, search, the roadmap, the RSS feed, the REST API, status/product counts, and notifications. Optionally let members submit private ideas too: only the author and your team can see them, and the author can publish one later (never the reverse). Your team sees an amber "Private" badge wherever one appears, and a filter to show only private ideas.

🎨 Theme studio

Your brand color and four per-function accents (buttons, votes, links, header) applied as design tokens across light and dark mode: set once in the admin, survives every redesign. Default appearance per site (light / dark / follow system), per-product colors, and raw custom CSS still available for everything else.

🔄 One-click updates

A System panel under the admin menu shows your installed version against the latest GitHub release (checked daily, re-check on demand) and, with the bundled updater sidecar, updates your instance from the browser. No SSH, no runbook, and the recovery steps are printed right on the panel for the day something goes wrong.

✦ Vora: an AI ideation agent (optional)

Turn rough thoughts into well-planned ideas: Vora interviews the submitter in chat, then drafts the title, a summary description, suggested tags, and a full Idea Brief, a structured plan saved with the post. Everything is reviewed and editable before submitting. Bring your own provider (Anthropic, OpenAI, or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint including a local LLM on your own network) with per-product interview instructions, admin-viewable conversation transcripts, and strict email privacy (the submitter's address is stored only as a token, never rendered to any browser). Optionally give Vora web search (Serper.dev or a self-hosted SearXNG) so it grounds ideas in current information when your instructions call for it. Off by default; one switch to enable. Want every idea to arrive well formed? Turn on Require Vora and the board's form starts with Vora for everyone (assistants over MCP and API-key integrations can still submit directly).

🤖 Works with Claude and other AI assistants (MCP)

Upvora speaks the Model Context Protocol at https://your-board/mcp. Point Claude (or any MCP client) at it: people sign in with your board's own sign-in, approve the connection, and the assistant can then search and post ideas, vote, comment and, for your team, run the whole board, with exactly that person's permissions (every tool replays the same REST endpoint the UI uses). Submitting an idea follows Vora's interview and attaches the same Idea Brief. Off by default; you choose who may connect (admins, team, or any member), per-person and per-app rate limits, an audit line for every tool call, and one switch to turn it all off. Board on an internal network? Give it an MCP-only public address (MCP_ORIGINS): that address serves the MCP connection and nothing else, so Claude, ChatGPT and other cloud assistants can connect while the board, its ideas and its admin stay internal.

🔐 Sign-in your users already have

Passwordless email magic links out of the box, plus Google, GitHub, and any OAuth2/OIDC provider (Microsoft, Authentik, Keycloak…). Visitors bring an account they already own.

📧 Email your way

Send transactional mail through SMTP, Mailgun, Amazon SES, or Resend: pick one with a single env var. Magic-link sign-in, notifications, and invites all flow through it.

⚙️ And the whole engine underneath

Web + email notifications, webhooks, a REST API covering every board and admin action (per-user API keys), CSV export, team invitations, post moderation, GDPR-friendly privacy controls, 30+ languages, single-binary Docker image, migrations on boot. Built on Fider's proven core, kept current with upstream (tracking Fider v0.38.2, security releases included).

Screenshots

The public roadmap (lanes, product chips, toggle filters):

Upvora vs Fider

Upvora is a friendly fork of Fider (AGPL-3.0). The engine (data model, API, auth, operational simplicity) is excellent, and Upvora stays close enough to keep merging upstream improvements. On top of it:

	Fider	Upvora
Feedback board, voting, discussion	✅	✅ redesigned: dark-first, dense, inline voting
Statuses	fixed set	✅ fully custom (names, colors, home-page visibility)
Multiple products per portal	No	✅ chips, filters, /p/slug public boards
Public roadmap	✅	✅ lanes, filters, drag-to-restatus
Prioritization scorecard	No	✅ custom dimensions, fields, weighted ring
Internal notes & team-only comments	No	✅
Private ideas	No	✅ hidden on every surface; optional member-private ideas
AI assistants (MCP)	No	✅ OAuth sign-in per person, every action as a tool
REST API	core actions	✅ every board and admin action
Theming	custom CSS	✅ token-based color system + custom CSS
AI ideation agent (Vora)	No	✅ optional; BYO provider incl. local LLMs, web search, Idea Briefs, transcripts; can be required
File attachments	Images	✅ images plus PDF, text and Markdown, safety-checked and viewed in the board
Email delivery	SMTP · Mailgun · SES	✅ + Resend
In-app updates	No	✅ System panel + updater sidecar
Engine, API, SSO, i18n, webhooks	✅	✅ inherited, kept current

Want the smallest tool with the largest community? Use Fider. It's great. Want everything above out of the box? Welcome.

Getting started (self-hosted)

One image, one Postgres, and one-click updates included:

curl -LO https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hodyhq/Upvora/main/docker-compose.example.yml
mv docker-compose.example.yml docker-compose.yml
# edit BASE_URL, secrets and SMTP, then:
docker compose up -d

docker-compose.example.yml ships the app, Postgres, and the updater sidecar that powers the admin System panel's Update now button (the sidecar is self-configuring and the only container holding the Docker socket; remove it if you'd rather update by hand). Migrating from Fider? Keep your database and env values, swap the compose for this one, and the migrations upgrade your data on first boot.

Or hand-rolled, without the updater:

# docker-compose.yml
services:
  db:
    image: postgres:17
    environment:
      POSTGRES_USER: upvora
      POSTGRES_PASSWORD: change-me
      POSTGRES_DB: upvora
    volumes: [db-data:/var/lib/postgresql/data]

  app:
    image: ghcr.io/hodyhq/upvora:latest   # or pin a release tag, e.g. :v0.38.2.8.0
    depends_on: [db]
    ports: ["3000:3000"]
    environment:
      BASE_URL: https://feedback.yourdomain.com
      DATABASE_URL: postgres://upvora:change-me@db:5432/upvora?sslmode=disable
      JWT_SECRET: generate-a-long-random-secret
      EMAIL_NOREPLY: [email protected]
      EMAIL_SMTP_HOST: smtp.yourprovider.com
      EMAIL_SMTP_PORT: "587"
      EMAIL_SMTP_USERNAME: your-smtp-user
      EMAIL_SMTP_PASSWORD: your-smtp-password
      EMAIL_SMTP_ENABLE_STARTTLS: "true"

volumes:
  db-data:

docker compose up -d

(Prefer building from source? docker build -t upvora . in this repo produces the same image.)

Migrations run on start; the app serves on port 3000. Put a TLS-terminating proxy in front (Traefik, Caddy, nginx, or a Cloudflare tunnel) and open BASE_URL. Tag-on-post and Prometheus metrics (:4000, keep it internal) ship enabled; social sign-in is two env vars away (OAUTH_GOOGLE_*, OAUTH_GITHUB_*).

Internal board, cloud assistants (MCP): cloud assistants call your board from the internet, so an internal-only board needs a public address for MCP. Set MCP_ORIGINS=https://mcp.yourdomain.com (comma-separated, https, no path) and MCP_PORT=3001, publish that port to your tunnel only, and point the public hostname at it (for example a Cloudflare tunnel to http://upvora:3001). Everything arriving on MCP_PORT serves only /mcp, the OAuth endpoints, their discovery documents and the consent page; every other path is a 404, whatever the request's headers say. People sign in on the internal BASE_URL the first time they connect (the consent step goes there and back, bound to the browser that started it), so that one step needs the internal network; after that the connection renews from anywhere. Connect assistants to https://mcp.yourdomain.com/mcp (Admin, MCP lists it). Without MCP_PORT, Upvora recognises the public hostname from the Host and X-Forwarded-Host headers, which is only safe behind a proxy that routes by hostname and passes Host through unchanged; never rewrite Host to the board's name, and never expose port 3000 itself. Upvora refuses to start if MCP_ORIGINS or MCP_PORT is invalid.

One-click updates: included in docker-compose.example.yml. On an existing deployment, copy its updater service + updater-shared volume + the two updater lines on the app service into your compose (the System panel in the admin also shows these instructions when the sidecar is missing). The sidecar holds the Docker socket so the app container never has to. The app only writes an empty trigger file.

Development

Node 22, Go 1.25, Docker (for Postgres):

make watch          # hot-reload server + UI
make lint           # golangci-lint + eslint
make test           # server + UI unit tests

CI runs the same checks on every merge request into main.

License & attribution

Upvora is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0: see LICENSE. It is a derivative work of getfider/fider (also AGPL-3.0); the original Fider copyright notices are retained. If you run a modified copy as a network service, the AGPL requires you to make your source available to its users.

Upvora is an independent project and is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Fider team.