Field Notes

URL: fieldnotes.irregulars.io | Source: apps/fieldnotes/

Field Notes is the community’s publication platform — a place where any member can write and submit articles on cybersecurity, OSINT, AI/ML, military technology, and community topics. Articles go through an admin review workflow before publication, ensuring quality while keeping the barrier to contribution low.

Why It Exists

Knowledge shared in Signal groups and forum threads is valuable but hard to discover later. Field Notes gives community members a structured way to publish longer-form content — guides, analysis, lessons learned, and original research — that’s indexed, searchable, and permanently accessible.

Features

Article Submission — Markdown-based content creation with HTML rendering, auto-generated excerpts, and reading time estimation
Review Workflow — Admins review, approve, or request changes before publication. Post versioning tracks editorial history
Visibility Controls — Three levels: public (anyone), community (logged-in members), private (author + admins)
10 Categories — Blog, Guides, Technical, News, Research, Community, Military, Privacy & Security, Events, Reference
Comments System — Threaded comments with edit tracking and deletion (own comments or admin)
Personal Notes — Private “My Notes” section for user-specific content
RSS Feed — Full RSS endpoint at /rss with category-specific feeds
Featured Posts — Hero section for featured articles with view count tracking
Search & Browse — Full-text search on title and content, browse by category or tags

Content

Field Notes replaced Discourse as the community’s primary forum platform. The Signal bot’s forum integration was migrated from Discourse to Field Notes, making it the canonical place for community long-form content.

The platform launched with 47+ articles imported from Discourse, covering all community interest areas. Each imported post preserves its original discourse_topic_id for deduplication, and content sources are tracked (discourse, manual, or signal-bot).

Signal Bot Integration

Field Notes is integrated with the Signal bot’s !forum command:

!forum — Shows Field Notes overview and recent posts
Posts created from Signal are tracked with source_type: 'signal-bot'
New publications can be announced to relevant Signal groups
The bot authenticates to Field Notes via BOT_API_KEY for admin operations

Integrations

Signal Bot ←→ Field Notes API (article notifications)
Field Notes → Task Exchange (follow-up tasks from articles)
Field Notes → Authentik SSO (login, author identity)
Field Notes → Discourse Forum (imported content source)

Signal Bot — Article notifications and forum command integration
Task Exchange — Articles can spawn related community tasks at task.irregulars.io
Discourse Forum — Original content source; ongoing sync potential

Tech Stack

Component	Technology
Runtime	Cloudflare Workers
Framework	Hono
Database	D1 (posts, categories, users)
Sessions	KV (`BLOG_SESSIONS`)
Cache	KV (`BLOG_CACHE`)
Storage	R2 (media uploads)
Auth	Authentik OIDC (PKCE) via `@irregularchat/shared-utils`