XMind

A better Forum posting system

1. there is one discussion area

2. Initially user's simply add comments

3. This continues for a certain time/ untill 1 comment gets the highest rating

4. Now The highest rated comment becomes the first post on the thread

5. all comments get nested and hidden within the first post

6. The discussion area is cleared of comments to allow discussion to continue and form the second post

   1. To view comments for an earlier post, user can hover over/click each post

   2. the winning post can therefore be seen in it's original context!

7. This results in the highest rated comments being the posts on the forum

   1. Goal accomplished: all the lower quality posts are hidden

   2. they still exist but only appear when the user expands that post

8. At the same time hovering over a post let's user's see the post as it occured in the comment discussion

9. once a post is created, commenting is disabled for the post

10. commenting takes place below existing posts

11. posts and comments need to appear different

    1. post looks official and very important

    2. comments look more like youtube comments

12. the whole system aims to "feel" like a regular forum

13. there will be pagination of posts.. maybe 15 posts per page

1. Intuitive Design

   1. Behavior as close as possible to a normal forum

      1. look at boards.ie and mimmicking that

      2. makes things more familiar to users

      3. as few as possible features. keep simple

      4. all the user needs/wants to see is a reply button

      5. scrolling may be simpler than tabs

         1. user will expect scrolling

         2. for large screens tabs will mean a lot of unused space

      6. extra features

         1. private messaging

         2. flagging spam comments

         3. moderator powers

   2. some tooltips explaining things (like youtube has)

   3. ajax means only reloading a portion of the page,

2. Implementation

   1. A forum has topics which has posts which has comments

      1. simple one to many relationships

   2. a user has a topic/post/comment

      1. one to one relationship

   3. azure worker role - background tasks

      1. process votes, spam, mailing users

   4. azure has web role(delivers content)

   5. a comment has many votes from many users

      1. join between users/comments

3. Dev. Process

   1. Requirements and design

      1. writing report

      2. design visuals

   2. development

      1. client side

      2. database

      3. server side MVC

      4. deployment

   3. testing

      1. don't have time but

      2. some basic tests in visual studio

4. steps

   1. writing up requirements

      1. Topic

      2. MVC tutorial

   2. writing up design

   3. create database azure sql

      1. X

      2. link

      3. link2

   4. scaffold some CRUD functions for Comment

      1. X

   5. implement validation for Comment

      1. link

   6. some styling - Razor code for views

   7. implement log in for user (microsoft built in)

      1. X

   8. look into BB Code for comment.. is there a visual studio plug in?

   9. add ability to rate comment

   10. add logic to declare best comment as a Post(solution)

   11. scaffold for Threads, make list of threads the home page

   12. make clicking thread enter to comments area