Discussion Forum Server Specification

for "Software Engineering of Internet Applications" at MIT

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We will conduct an experiment to figure out whether "real name" discussion forums are more useful to participants than traditional mostly anonymous discussion forums. We will use the legacy users of the legacy site www.greenspun.com (the /bboard section) to quickly get a significant sample size.

The Basic Idea

We will operate a server where anyone can come to establish a discussion forum. The person who sets up a forum is called the "publisher." The publisher can decide whether a forum is public or private and whether the forum will be a "screen name forum" in which users are identified by whatever name they choose to type in, plus perhaps an email address (could be "samoyedlover@hotmail.com" and therefore does not identify anyone) or a "real name forum" in which users are identified by full name and their city of residence. In the real name forum, users are authenticated by a small credit card charge or by a referral/approval from an existing real name member.

We test whether or not a discussion group is effective with some of the metrics developed by the community research group at Microsoft (http://research.microsoft.com/community/) and their flagship system http://netscan.research.microsoft.com/. Are questions getting answered to the original poster's satisfaction? Is abusive language being used? Are discussions deteriorating into flame wars?

We write an academic journal paper summarizing our findings. Our hypothesis is that the real name, identified and authenticated communities will be much more effective for participants.

Practicalities

We transfer all of the legacy content from greenspun.com and continue to serve it at the same URLs (/bboard) so that we don't break links from Google and other places around the Internet. On every page, we invite people to start a new discussion forum at /groups using the new software. We also spam out email invitations to all of the registered publishers on greenspun.com telling them about the new improved service.

Features Desired

First and foremost we need powerful anti-spam defenses. When registering, a user should have to decode a word in one of those hard-to-read GIFs. Publishers should have the option that all content must be approved before going live as well as "delete all content from this IP address" or "delete all content from this user" or "delete all content containing the following string" (with an "are you sure you want to do this" if the result is more than 10 messages). The server should be able to distinguish between trusted (has posted several messages that have been approved) and untrusted (new or disapproved) users. Should be an option to let postings from trusted users go live immediately.

The discussion interface should be very clean and simple, which is what attracted all those publishers and users to greenspun.com/bboard in the first place (they could have used Yahoo! Groups, but they chose not to).

Only one format for discussions: question and answer. No option for threading.

Categorization tools for users and publishers so that postings can be categorized.

Soft deletion only, except for spam. Bad content is moderated so far down that it is almost impossible to find, but it is still there in the database.

Click on a person's name and you see all of their contributions.

Email spamming system for the publisher.

Discussion forum is available via RSS.

System for figuring out if a forum is not being actively moderated, in which case it must be shut down because it becomes a magnet for spam.

Some Nice-to-Have Features

Miscellaneous

There is some legacy static content on the site belonging to my brother. We get rid of this and give him and his kid a Wordpress Weblog (do we need to install more than one?).

Tasks

philg@mit.edu