Presentation Templates

The BBCode a listing is built from, editable by the members who write listings. The generator at /torrents/fiche renders a template against the metadata it gathered; which template it uses is a choice, not a constant.

Everyone starts with the same built-in default — the layout the generator has always produced. It is a code constant, not a row: nobody can delete it, every account has it, and it needs no seeding on a fresh install.

What a member can do

/templates, reachable from Settings.

• Create a template, up to the per-user quota (default 5, see below).
• Duplicate the built-in default, one of their own, or one from the site catalogue — the fastest honest start, since a template is easier to adjust than to invent.
• Set a default, which the generator preselects. Clearing it falls back to the built-in one.
• Delete their own.
• Revert an edit in progress to the version last saved. Distinct from reset, which replaces the body with the built-in layout and is almost never what someone editing a saved template wants.

Writing one

The editor edits raw BBCode source. That is deliberate: a template is whitespace-sensitive — a leading space, a blank line, a missing trailing newline all change the listing — and a rich editor that round-trips through HTML cannot preserve that.

Two constructs beyond plain text:

Syntax	Meaning
{{VARIABLE}}	Replaced by the value. Unknown names render empty.
{{#VARIABLE}}…{{/VARIABLE}}	Kept only when the value is non-empty.
{{^VARIABLE}}…{{/VARIABLE}}	Kept only when it is empty.
{{! note }}	A comment. Never rendered.

A section tag alone on its line takes the whole line with it, so a block that renders nothing leaves no blank line behind. That is what lets the built-in default reproduce the original layout exactly.

The source editor

A textarea, with the shortcuts a textarea should have:

Keys	Effect
Ctrl/⌘ + Z, Ctrl/⌘ + ⇧ + Z	Undo, redo — the browser's own
Ctrl/⌘ + B / I / U	Wrap the selection in [b] / [i] / [u]
Ctrl/⌘ + K	Wrap it in [url=]…[/url]
Ctrl/⌘ + /	Switch the selected lines off, or back on

Undo deserves a note. Writing to the field from code — a toolbar button, a variable inserted from the palette — clears the browser's undo history rather than adding to it, which is why those actions used to cost you every Ctrl+Z step you had built up. Every programmatic edit now goes in as a real insertion (document.execCommand('insertText')), so undo and redo keep working across toolbar clicks and variable insertions alike. The same fix applies to the BBCode source mode of the upload editor, which had the identical problem.

Switching a block off wraps it in {{#OFF}} / {{/OFF}} rather than in a comment. That is not a stylistic choice: a {{! … }} comment ends at the first }}, so commenting out a line containing a variable leaves the tail of it rendering — {{! [b]{{TITLE}}[/b] }} really does emit [/b] }}. A section on a name nothing fills renders nothing whatever its body holds, and the standalone-line rule removes the two markers cleanly, so switching a block off and on again gives the template back unchanged.

The Variables pane lists every name the generator can fill, grouped, with a description. Clicking one inserts it at the cursor. Names outside that list are flagged as you type — an unknown variable renders empty rather than erroring, so a typo like {{TITRE}} would otherwise be invisible until the listing came out short.

Category (Universal / Video) records what a template's variables assume, and the picker shows it next to the layout you selected. It is a label, not a filter: the metadata lookup only ever returns films and series, so filtering the picker on it would exclude nothing today. The list route accepts ?category= for the day a non-video category exists.

Some variables are blocks: several already-formatted lines, such as the audio track list. They exist because those lines are built with three different separators that a template cannot express — but you decide whether and where a block appears.

Templates are parsed when you save — by the same parser the browser renders with, which is why it lives in packages/shared. An unclosed section is refused with the line number rather than stored, because a broken template that reached the site catalogue would fail for every viewer instead of for its author.

Site templates

A member's templates are their own and private. The catalogue everybody sees is curated on /admin/templates, and that page is the only way a template gets there — there is no publish button anywhere, and the member write routes have no visibility field for one to hook into.

An admin can add, edit and remove site templates. Members see them read-only in a third section of /templates and in the wizard's picker, and can duplicate one to get an editable copy.

Three properties are worth knowing:

• A site template has no owner. The row's owner_id is NULL, so deleting the admin account that added it does not take the template with it. Who added it is recorded separately in created_by, which is ON DELETE SET NULL — the name can be lost, the template cannot. That column is the only trace of a staff action in the whole schema; there is no action log.
• A member's own template still dies with their account (owner_id is ON DELETE cascade), so a deleted user leaves no orphan drafts.
• A site template can never be somebody's default. The default flag lives on the row and a row belongs either to the site or to one member, so "always start from this one" means duplicating it. That is deliberate: an admin editing a catalogue entry would otherwise silently change what every member's next upload looks like.

Removing a catalogue entry stops it being offered. It does not touch copies members already made — a duplicate is a new row, not a reference — and it does not touch listings already posted, which carry rendered BBCode.

A CHECK constraint pins the two legal shapes, so no future codepath can invent a third:

(visibility = 'private' AND owner_id IS NOT NULL)
OR (visibility = 'site' AND owner_id IS NULL AND is_default = false)

Remote images and visitor privacy

A site template can log every viewer's IP

BBCode allows [img], and an image loaded from a third-party host tells that host the viewer's IP address, user agent and referring page. A site template is rendered for every member who opens the generator, so whoever controls the image host learns something about all of them. The built-in default itself loads its section banners from an external image host.

This is accepted as a known trade-off: preventing it means restricting what templates can do. It is also the reason the catalogue is admin-only rather than something members can add to — an admin adding a site template should treat its image hosts as part of what they are vouching for.

The fix, if it is ever wanted, is an image proxy — the site fetches remote images itself and re-serves them, so the third party only ever sees the server. That is a feature in its own right (cache, size limits, and SSRF protection through the existing safeFetch), not a setting.

The quota

templateQuotaPerUser, in the admin settings. Default 5, and it counts a member's own templates only. Copies of a site template are the member's own rows and do count; the catalogue itself does not, so an admin curating it does not spend their personal allowance.

The cap is enforced in the create endpoint, not in the browser, and creation is serialised per user with an advisory lock so a burst of concurrent requests cannot slip past it.

Where the pieces live

Concern	File
Renderer (shared by browser and API)	packages/shared/src/templateEngine.ts
Variable bag, blocks, built-in default	apps/web/app/utils/ficheTemplate.ts
The original generator, still the reference	apps/web/app/utils/ficheBbcode.ts
Storage	presentation_templates
Member API	apps/api/routes/api/me/templates/
Admin API (the site catalogue)	apps/api/routes/api/admin/templates/
Grammar guard, shared by all four write routes	apps/api/utils/templateGrammar.ts
Quota rules	apps/api/utils/templatePolicy.ts
Admin screen	apps/web/app/pages/admin/templates.vue

The built-in default and the original generator are held byte-identical by apps/web/test/ficheTemplate.test.ts, which renders the template and compares it character for character with buildFiche across the whole matrix of conditions. Changing the default template is therefore a deliberate act that breaks a test, not something that can happen by accident.