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Intuitive Design
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Behavior as close as possible to a normal forum
- look at boards.ie and mimmicking that
- makes things more familiar to users
- as few as possible features. keep simple
- all the user needs/wants to see is a reply button
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scrolling may be simpler than tabs
- user will expect scrolling
- for large screens tabs will mean a lot of unused space
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extra features
- private messaging
- flagging spam comments
- moderator powers
- some tooltips explaining things (like youtube has)
- ajax means only reloading a portion of the page,
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Implementation
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A forum has topics which has posts which has comments
- simple one to many relationships
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a user has a topic/post/comment
- one to one relationship
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azure worker role - background tasks
- process votes, spam, mailing users
- azure has web role(delivers content)
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a comment has many votes from many users
- join between users/comments
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Dev. Process
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Requirements and design
- writing report
- design visuals
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development
- client side
- database
- server side MVC
- deployment
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testing
- don't have time but
- some basic tests in visual studio
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steps
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writing up requirements
- Topic
- MVC tutorial
- writing up design
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create database azure sql
- X
- link
- link2
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scaffold some CRUD functions for Comment
- X
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implement validation for Comment
- link
- some styling - Razor code for views
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implement log in for user (microsoft built in)
- X
- look into BB Code for comment.. is there a visual studio plug in?
- add ability to rate comment
- add logic to declare best comment as a Post(solution)
- scaffold for Threads, make list of threads the home page
- make clicking thread enter to comments area
- there is one discussion area
- Initially user's simply add comments
- This continues for a certain time/ untill 1 comment gets the highest rating
- Now The highest rated comment becomes the first post on the thread
- all comments get nested and hidden within the first post
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The discussion area is cleared of comments to allow discussion to continue and form the second post
- To view comments for an earlier post, user can hover over/click each post
- the winning post can therefore be seen in it's original context!
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This results in the highest rated comments being the posts on the forum
- Goal accomplished: all the lower quality posts are hidden
- they still exist but only appear when the user expands that post
- At the same time hovering over a post let's user's see the post as it occured in the comment discussion
- once a post is created, commenting is disabled for the post
- commenting takes place below existing posts
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posts and comments need to appear different
- post looks official and very important
- comments look more like youtube comments
- the whole system aims to "feel" like a regular forum
- there will be pagination of posts.. maybe 15 posts per page