Reference no: EM132329625

Overview

There are features that has to be inculded in the Online Dal Discussion Forum of Dalhousie University that is a unique discussion forum. It allows students and faculties to discuss about the courses, workshops and other activities conducted in the university. The forum gives a distinct opportunity for student and faculties to communicate with each other. The forum has various features that provide a favorable platform for the users to have a discussion.

Some of the prominent features include post a discussion into general and subscribed groups, search, deactivating inactive threads, and reporting inappropriate content to the admin. The most highlighting feature of online discussion forum is karma points. The karma points give user special privileges which allows to unlock many features for the user. The karma points also ladder up the comment of users with highest karma points.

Task : You need to Prepare an online discussion fourm that include the features listed. All the instruction and requirements of the Discussion fourm for Dalhousie University illustraed below, Use all of them.

Features

1. Login : This feature will be the useful to authorize and authenticate the user. Anyone who wishes to use the website will need to login into the portal. The login will require a valid username and password to sign in.

2. Registration : Every user needs to be a student or faulty of Dalhousie University in order to use the website. This feature will allow a new user to register to the website. Figure 2 depicts the wireframe for the registration page.

3. Forgot Password : The forgot password feature allows the user to change the password incase the user forgets his password. Figure 3 depicts the wireframe for Forgot Password page

4. User Profile : This page contains all the personal information of a user. The page displays contact information, general information and additional information of a user, such as the group subscription.

5. Post a Discussion/ Add a post page : If the user clicks on Add post button on the homepage then user must be redirected to post a discussion page. Figure 5 depicts add a post screen.

6. Homepage : After successful login the user will be redirected to the Homepage of Dal Discussion and will be able to navigate through the website. Figure 6 depicts the home screen of the application.

7. Personal Activity Feed : When the user clicks on Dashboard then it must display the list of all personal activity feeds that user has posted till date.

• When the user clicks on Edit post, then it must allow the user to edit the existing post and check for the comments as well.

• If the user clicks on delete button, then the post must get deleted from the list of all existing posts.

• There is a karma % for the selected post and overall karma % which determines the likeliness of that post.

• There is a list of all private groups under the My group section and they should be able to navigate to their respective pages of that group

8. Subscription request to join a group : The user can access all posts that belong to the global discussion. To access posts that are present in a group, the user must subscribe to it. The number of subscriptions for each user is defined by their karma points. If the free subscription limit is reached, the request for subscription to a new group is sent to the admin for review.

• After login the join button is for requesting to join the discussion on clicking that join button a request to admin dashboard is being posted and admin will take decision to accept it ordecline it.

9. Search : Search is an essential feature that helps the user to seek and navigate to what he desires to see on the website. The result of the search can be relative or specific depending on user input.

10. Karma Points : Karma points is a way to keep the users of the application engaged. Karma points provide the users with special privileges. The comment made by a user with highest karma points is moved to the top. Based on the karma points the user can get direct access to more groups without admin approval. The user's karma points can be viewed on the user profile page.

11. Reporting Inappropriate discussion item : The user of the application can report any content if found abusive or that does not comply to the standards of the discussion forum. The user can report an item only one time, after that the report button will be disabled for that specific item. The list of reported items is displayed to the admin for review. The admin can then act on the reported item and either delete it or resolve it.

A single post can be resolved by the admin only three times. If the post is reported for the fourth time, then the post can either be permanently deleted or permanently resolved.

12. Deactivating Inactive threads : As the application will have many posts, it is necessary to keep track of which topics are being discussed and which are not. If a post is not being discussed for a set time period, it will be marked as inactive. Such posts will not be displayed on the main landing page but will be available for search and will still be displayed on the user’s personal feeds page. This will help reduce the page load time.

13. Club all posts into one : The UI for this section is same as the Homepage of the Dal Discussion website. All the posts falling under same domain will be clubbed together and displayed as one stack. For example: If someone posts for Interface in java and other guy posts for Abstraction in java, then those both posts will be clubbed into one main post: JAVA and then must be displayed as one post. When the user clicks on JAVA post, then all the related posts should be visible.

14. Organize Posts by Titles. : This feature will organize all the posts in discussion groups with a title.

15. Posts with images. : With this feature user can also post pictures within a discussion group along with the text. This feature is only available for subscribed users. The images can be in format: jpg, jpeg, and png.