Pondr

Team Members

1. Patrick Ma - 68504364
2. Prateek Balani - 68220110
3. Mariya Putwa - 28826089

Project Description

Overview:

We will be making a Discussion Forum Website called Pondr. It will draw inspiration from established forums like Reddit and HackerNews. Pondr aims to create a user-friendly environment that encourages free-flowing discussions and facilitates thoughtful and meaningful dialogue. Discussions will be implemented in a hierarchical structure (known in most forum applications as a thread) where registered users make posts, comment on their own or other’s posts, and reply to other comments.

Goals:

Pondr is committed to providing a rich, interactive and unique environment for discussion. Its objectives include:

• Facilitating conversations on various subjects, ideas and topics.
• Creating a seamless sharing experience of stories, opinions and multimedia.
• Providing unrestricted viewing access to all visitors to ensure wider reach and more inclusive participation.

General Minimum Requirements (Deliverables)

All Users:

• Can join the Pondr community with an easy registration process to create an account with their name, email, profile photo, and password.
• Can log in once registered with user ID and password.
• Can browse all public discussions and comments without the need to register.
• Can utilize search tools and navigation.
• Can view any public user's profile, including posts, and comments.

Registered Users:

• Can use a “forgot password” functionality when logging in (Recovery Token or Email).
• Can make discussion posts which will be dated with a title, body text, and other optional elements such as links to other sources, and images.
• Can label their discussion posts into subcategories for easier search and reachability.
• Can “like” a discussion post and interact through feedback mechanisms.
• Can make comments which will also be dated on discussion posts and participate in dialogue.
• Can make sub-comments on threads.
• Can sort discussion thread comments for clarity (by date or popularity)(thread navigation). View real-time like, comment and share count updates.
• Can edit and view profiles.
• Can easily navigate through threads and subthreads (breadcrumb strategy).

Administrators:

• Can monitor and manage (enable/disable) user accounts to ensure adherence to community standards.
• Moderation tools to oversee content, such as delete, edit or archive functions.
• Data filtering for usage reports and platform analytics in the form of charts tracking the number of accounts created per selected time frame
• Search registered users by name, email, and posts.

Front-end Development:

• Ensure a dynamic, responsive user interface using front-end languages such as Javascript, HTML5 and CSS.
• Implement CSS frameworks such as Bootstrap to ensure the implementation of common usability principles.
• Focused on creating a user-centric design with interactive elements for enhanced user engagement.
• Elegant layout design with contextual changes using Bootstrap
• Email and password formatting validation using form validation in JavaScript.
• Real-time asynchronous updates to discussion threads using - AJAX.
• Navigational error handling using error pages (404 not found or 500 internal server error) to guide users back to main content.

Back-end Development:

• Utilizing PHP as a server-side language (no additional frameworks).
• Utilizing MySQL as our DBMS.
• Utilizing AJAX to allow our web pages to update asynchornously and allow for real-time form validation such as username availability during registration.
• Required security measures taken to ensure data privacy and security i.e. hashing passwords etc.

Enhanced (possible) Features:

• Unique discussion formats such as timed debates to provide a fresh twist to standard forum discussions.
• Features to create polls within threads to allow users to engage through votes.
• Standard recommendation engine based on user activity (threads viewed or participated in) to suggest similar threads.