KnowVerse: An Academic Discussion Platform Based on an Auditable Reputation Ledger and Role-Based Access Control

Abstract

Online academic discussion environments need transparent and verifiable mechanisms for evaluating user contributions, yet existing platforms may emphasize broad social engagement or lack structured academic moderation and reputation governance. This paper presents KnowVerse, an academic discussion platform, implemented with Laravel, MariaDB, and WebSockets, built around an append-only, auditable reputation ledger and a Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) model. Every reputation-related action is recorded as an independent ledger entry, and every retraction as a compensating entry referencing the canceled action, so each user’s score can be traced, verified, and recomputed. Accumulated reputation determines a platform-defined academic standing and unlocks a few participation privileges, whereas administrative authority is assigned manually through a five-tier RBAC model and never derived from reputation. An automated suite of 126 tests assessed access control, injection resistance, anti-farming safeguards, and ledger consistency. Concurrency experiments with up to 16 parallel processes on MariaDB confirmed that no ledger entry was reversed twice and no ledger invariant was violated, and showed that double reversals occur when both row locks and the unique constraint are removed. An ablation against a counter-only design showed that the ledger increases mean vote latency by 4.9 ms (27%) and 95th-percentile latency by 18 ms (55%), while enabling every injected alteration of the stored score to be detected and accurately restored. Performance was evaluated on a single workstation across repeated trials. The results show a transparent, auditable mechanism for reputation computation and role-based access control; its effect on user trust and interaction quality is left to future work.