Quick Response

Wednesday, April 14, 2010

We're making our own internet forum software

Following our previous initiative on working on our first software, we feel moved to go to the next step, to make our own internet forum software. This is not a new project since it is a revival of halfey's old project, "Project Ophirus" which was before hosted at Watermark Project Forum (now inactive) and it will keep the same goal with some additions. For the time being we are planning to name the final product as Zettai Forum (temporary name) but we have yet finalizing anything yet.

As many of you already know, we are lacking experienced programmer, especially for this project, we would need some good PHP and MySQL coder, as well as people who can work on Javascript and XML (AJAX to be specific). Therefore this is a call for any volunteers to join the project.

Our target is to release the first working version of the forum by the end of the year. We will make the software free of all costs and open-source under custom license (most probably Creative-Commons compatible), so we hope our volunteers wouldn't mind about that. It will feature both (user selectable) threaded or flat forum. Both installation and upgrading will be wizard-based. For upgrading, we decided to make it possible for user to upload the updated files via the upgrade wizard. We will also provide the similar wizard for plugin installation, as well as for remote upgrading so user don't have to re-upload new files everytime updates is released. Yes, we also support third-party plugins for forum customization.

For now we have no plan to use data storage other than MySQL and flat text files since those are the most widely used data storage for internet forum. however we have plans to add support for other SQL-based data storage too such as PostgreSQL, MS-SQL and/or SQLite in our future releases. We will also consider non-SQL data storage too like Oracle and/or MS-Access. For official programming language, we will use PHP for this project but developers are free to port it to other language like ASP, PERL or Java.

Like most other internet forum software, Zettai Forum will feature BBCode by default. Other posting features would include HTML (disabled by default for security reason), emoticons, formatting toolbar, WYSIWYG editor (can be disabled by forum members), nested/threaded quoting, syntax highlighting, and attachments (can be disabled by admins).

For forumming capabilities, categorization, unlimited subforums, forum redirection and thread tagging will be made available as well. "Last/latest post" display will be featured too, as well as trashcan forum as a "buffer zone" for deleted discussions so that they be reviewed again before final decision is made to delete them permanently or to restore them back. One unique feature user will see is what we call "crosslink/shadow thread" where the same thread may appear in two or more forums/categories, depending on the limit set by the administrator. We choose to include this feature in our forum because we know some topics may fit in more than one category.

We know that internet is not always a safe place because we are also a heavy internet users like many of other people out there. Therefore security is still one of our major concern. For that we will adopt both re-CAPTCHA and Akismet as our default SPAMbot prevention mechanism, together with other security measures such as group control, flood control, Access Control Lists (ACLs), blacklisting system, warning system, banning system, IP-blocking system, audit logging, user reporting system. We are also considering to include post-rating and public moderation as part of our community moderation initiative. That will allow normal users to rate posts as relevant/ irrelevant, positive/negative and many more, and then some other normal users who have enough accumulated moderating points may moderate that post with any of the moderating option available to them. We think this is an important feature because we know some people tend to become abusive once they hold power (we know for we've seen such case so many times already). Not to mention that not all moderators are always online so we think this would give them some peace of mind to go offline for a little longer once in a while.

What's the point of dynamic content without syndication, right? We have thought about this and since forum content is often changing so we will make RSS/ATOM available for either forums, groups, categories, threads and even tags or even the entire forum itself. For now we don't have any intention to add instant messaging system to the in-forum private messaging system but we will substitute it with private threads. Private threads will appear as a separate forum section at either top or bottom of the forum index (according to user preferences) and all private threads of which the user is in will be available inside it. Also due to the dynamic content we will make thread bookmarking/subscription system so user can subscribe to their favorite threads. Just like the private threads mentioned above, subscribed threads will be available in another separate personal forum. Alternatively, if the user found having too much separate forum is cluttered, s/he may choose to have the links to private/subscribed threads in his/her control panel. For user convenience, we will also allow user to send emails via forum interface.

Forum in the basis of internet community and we never forget about the need to interact with each other outside the discussion. Apart from the private messaging system mentioned above, we will also feature common forum features like avatar, signatures, user online lists as well as custom profile fields. Other than that, will also feature user ranking system, rating/karma system and friend system. Initially we wanted to make friend system as a plugin but after giving it much thoughts, we decided to include it in the actual release of the software. After all, what's the point of having an internet community without the built-in ability to befriend other people.

We have mentioned above about community moderation, and now we are into the core moderation system. Other than having just global or forum/category-specific moderators, thread moderation may also made available to the thread starter. We also decided to take thread moderation system one step further, by allowing thread starter to appoint moderators for his/her own threads. Available moderating actions including move threads, copy threads, split threads, merge threads, close/lock threads, shadow (crosslink) topics, sticky threads, important threads and bump threads.

Sometimes it is hard to look for a specific thread/post especially in a forum with thousands of them. Therefore we will include powerful search engine to help users. It will also accompanied with advanced search feature that will allow user to define specific criteria like full-text search and author search. Unread topic search will also available via database tracking.

As part of the forum customization system, we will support localization via language pack. For now, other than the default English language, the only language packs we have is Malay (Malaysia), l33t (yes, the h4x0r language) and lolcat (yes, we mean it!) so we will need contributors for other languages too. Forum templates editor will also available for global setting, forum specific, and CSS. All this also comes with built-in skin editor. Custom BBCodes will also available for extra post/article formatting. Also to spice up the forum posts, smiley pack/emoticons will also available. Like we have mentioned earlier, more features/functions can be expanded/extended via our rich plugin system.

As the basis of internet community, we know forumming features alone is not enough, thus we simply included some special features such as forum statistics, polls, calendar, friendly URLs, as well as out-of-the-box search engines optimization (SEO). Lo-fi view also available for slow connections. Also available is the mobile-mode view for users on mobile devices. Other extra features would be database optimization, pruning, archiving and backup (for root administrators). Users may also export threads, private messages and friend lists for personal archiving.

Even before we actually release this software, we already have plans for its future. Some of the features we think worth considering is Facebook/Twitter/micro-blogging integration, Gravatar, OpenID login, blog-bridging (for forum owner) and cross-posting to other sites like Tumblr/Posterous (for all users). However, for now we encourage coders out there to make plugins to enable these features.

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