A social idea board that makes your team's suggestion box actually work.
Idea Wall turns the dusty, ignored "suggestion box" into a living social feed. Employees post improvement ideas (with photos), react and comment on each other's, earn points on a contributor leaderboard, vote for Employee of the Month, and watch it all scroll live on an office TV. It's an employee engagement + continuous-improvement platform you can self-host in minutes.
Built by Antarestar for its own team, battle-tested with ~150 daily users, and open-sourced so any company can run its own.
Stack: Node.js + Express, plain JSON-file storage, Server-Sent Events for realtime. No database, no build step, no front-end framework. One
npm startand it's live.
Most companies "collect ideas" through a physical box, a Google Form, or a WhatsApp group. All three fail the same way:
- Ideas disappear. Nobody sees them, nobody knows what happened to theirs, so people stop bothering.
- No feedback loop. A submitter never learns if their idea was read, rejected, or shipped.
- No recognition. The person who saved the company money gets nothing — not even a "thanks."
- No visibility for leadership. Management can't see themes, momentum, or who's contributing.
Idea Wall fixes all four by making ideas public, social, trackable, and rewarded — the same mechanics that make social media addictive, pointed at making your company better.
| Use case | How Idea Wall helps |
|---|---|
| Continuous improvement / Kaizen | A single place to capture operational fixes from the floor, tag their status (Pending → In Progress → Done), and showcase what shipped. |
| Employee engagement | Likes, comments, points, and a leaderboard turn "giving feedback" into something people want to do. |
| Employee recognition | Built-in Employee of the Month voting with company core values, live results, and a Hall of Champions. |
| Innovation / R&D intake | Collect product/process ideas, spot recurring themes, and prioritize with the admin analytics dashboard. |
| Internal comms / town halls | The TV dashboard turns idle office screens into a live wall of ideas and wins — great for lobbies, cafeterias, and all-hands. |
| HR culture programs | Categories like "Sports Day" and seasonal campaigns run alongside work ideas to build community. |
| Leadership insight | The admin dashboard surfaces categories, status breakdowns, trends over time, top contributors, and a word cloud — a pulse on what the team cares about. |
| Onboarding & belonging | New hires post their first idea on day one and instantly feel heard. |
It works for a 10-person studio or a 1,000-person factory — anywhere people have ideas and deserve to be heard.
Mobile-first, Pinterest-style responsive masonry (1 column on phones, up to 4 on desktop). Every idea is a card with the author, a photo, category badge, status badge, like count, and comments. New ideas, likes, and comments appear in realtime for everyone via Server-Sent Events — no refresh needed. A "favorite idea" banner highlights the most-liked post.
- Username + password accounts (SHA-256 + per-user salt).
- Optional Google Sign-In (OAuth) — one click, no password.
- Cookie sessions that survive server restarts (nobody gets logged out on deploy).
- Configurable anonymous browsing.
Ideas are tagged (Improvement 💡, Sports Day 🏆, etc.) and move through Pending → In Progress → Done, so every submitter can see exactly what happened to their idea. The feed and profile show status at a glance.
Points for posting and engaging, ranked all-time / month / week / day, with a podium for the top three. Turns improvement into a friendly competition.
A complete voting system: admin opens a round → members vote for a colleague and pick one of five company core values (with an optional reason) → live tally on the leaderboard and a dedicated EOTM TV view → admin closes and announces the winner. Supports single-winner or per-value modes, and keeps a Hall of Champions history.
A dedicated page celebrating ideas that actually shipped — proof to the whole team that ideas here get done, which keeps people contributing.
An auto-scrolling, always-on view for office screens: the newest ideas scroll by, new submissions trigger a live spotlight animation, and investor-friendly KPI chips (total ideas, contributors, likes, comments) sit on top. Built to look great on a lobby TV.
A cinematic HTML5-Canvas flappy game (day/night cycle, procedural sound, its own leaderboard) baked in at /game as a light re-engagement hook. Reskinnable to your brand.
Three tabs behind a password:
- Dashboard — analytics: category & status breakdowns, trend charts, top contributors, word cloud, EOTM overview.
- Manage ideas — change status, delete, comment, with filter + search.
- EOTM — open/close/reset voting rounds and pick the mode.
A bell with an unread badge pings a member when someone likes or comments their idea, or when a voting round opens.
git clone https://github.com/ffaizdaffa/idea-wall-antarestar.git
cd idea-wall-antarestar
npm install
cp .env.example .env # then edit .env (at minimum set ADMIN_PASSWORD)
npm startOpen http://localhost:3030, register an account, and post your first idea — it appears in the feed instantly. Admin panel is at /admin (password from your .env). The app creates empty data files on first run; a handful of demo ideas are seeded so the feed isn't empty.
Everything is set via environment variables (see .env.example):
| Variable | Required | Description |
|---|---|---|
PORT |
no | HTTP port (default 3030) |
ADMIN_PASSWORD |
yes | Password for the /admin panel |
GOOGLE_CLIENT_ID |
no | Google OAuth client ID — leave blank to disable Google login |
GOOGLE_CLIENT_SECRET |
no | Google OAuth client secret |
GOOGLE_REDIRECT |
no | OAuth callback URL, e.g. https://yourhost/auth/google/callback |
Username/password login always works; Google Sign-In only turns on when the OAuth vars are set.
This ships with Antarestar branding as a working example. To make it your company's:
- Replace the logos in
public/assets/(antares-a.png,antarestar-logo.jpg) with yours. - Swap the wordmark/colors — shared styles live in
public/assets/app.css; each page is a self-contained HTML file inpublic/. - Edit the core values for Employee of the Month (
CORE_VALUESnear the top ofserver.js). - Adjust categories and copy to match your culture.
No framework to learn — it's HTML, CSS, and vanilla JS.
server.jsis the entire backend: routing, auth (member sessions + optional Google OAuth + admin), idea CRUD, likes/comments, the SSE broadcast channel, Employee-of-the-Month logic, the game leaderboard, notifications, and photo uploads. It uses a tiny built-in cookie parser — the only runtime dependency is Express.public/holds one self-contained HTML file per page (feed, login, form, profile, leaderboard, admin, TV, game). Easy to read, easy to fork a single page.data/is JSON-file storage, auto-created at startup and gitignored so real data never lands in git. Example shapes are indata/*.example.json. For heavy traffic, swap theload*/save*helpers for a real database.
idea-wall-antarestar/
├── server.js # the whole backend
├── .env.example
├── data/ # JSON storage (runtime, gitignored) + *.example.json
└── public/
├── index.html login.html form.html profile.html
├── leaderboard.html diterapkan.html admin.html
├── tv.html eotm-tv.html game.html
└── assets/ # shared css/js + logos
| Route | Page | Access |
|---|---|---|
/ |
Social feed | Public |
/login |
Login / register (+ Google) | Public |
/form |
Submit idea | Public |
/profile |
Member profile | Public |
/leaderboard |
Contributor + EOTM leaderboard | Public |
/diterapkan |
Implemented-ideas hall of fame | Public |
/game |
Kejar Antares mini-game | Public |
/tv · /eotm-tv |
TV signage dashboards | Public |
/admin |
Admin panel | Password |
A standard Node/Express app — run it anywhere Node runs:
- VPS —
npm install && npm startbehind nginx + PM2, point a domain at it, add HTTPS (e.g. certbot). Ensure the process can write todata/andpublic/uploads/. - PaaS (Render / Railway / Fly / a hosting panel) — set the env vars, run
node server.js.
For Google login in production, add your deploy URL's /auth/google/callback as an authorized redirect URI in Google Cloud Console and set GOOGLE_REDIRECT to match.
- No secrets in the repo — admin/OAuth values come from environment variables only.
- No real data in the repo — real ideas, member accounts, sessions, and uploaded photos are gitignored; only fictional demo content is shipped.
- Passwords are hashed (SHA-256 + salt). For a public-facing deployment, consider a slow hash (bcrypt/argon2) and rate limiting.
- The admin panel uses a single shared password — fine for a small internal tool; add per-user roles if you need finer control.
Do I need a database? No. It stores everything in JSON files. Swap in a database only if you outgrow that.
Does it scale? It comfortably handles ~150 concurrent internal users on a small VPS (gzip + response caching + SSE debounce are built in). For thousands of users, move storage to a database.
Can employees stay anonymous? Browsing can be anonymous; posting/voting can require login. It's configurable.
Is it only in Indonesian? The UI copy is Indonesian (it's an Indonesian company's tool) but it's plain text in the HTML files — translate it to any language by editing the strings.
Issues and PRs welcome — especially translations, new themes, and accessibility. Keep the stack dependency-light (Express only) and the front-end framework-free.
MIT. Antarestar names and logos are brand assets excluded from the license grant — swap them for your own. See the note in the license file.