Design Goals for the Venice Project

1. A replacement for the CommunityWare/WebbMe conferencing system
2. Java/JSP/servlets implementation running under Apache Tomcat, MySQL backend
3. Multiple communities hosted per server, each with multiple conferences (and other features); users logged into one server can join multiple communities
4. Conferencing functionality similar to CW/WebbMe:
   • Linear topics composed of HTML messages
   • View topics by new messages/unread/all messages/hidden topics/archived topics
   • Topics can be deleted/archived/made read-only by the conference host
   • Topics can be hidden from a user's personal view
   • Individual posts can be "hidden" or "scribbled" by owner or conference host
   • Posts can be previewed, with spellchecking and HTML formatting
   • Files can be "attached" to posts (up to 1 Mb in size)
5. Enhancements to existing conference features:
   • Full text search of posts within a conference
   • Conference-level "bozo filters"
   • Individual posts can be "nuked" without a trace by the conference host
6. Later, replace other CW/WebbMe functions:
   • Activity logs
   • Instant messaging and chat (use Jabber)
   • Calendaring
   • Newsletters via e-mail
7. Features from CW/WebbMe we won't do:
   • Web hosting
   • Web-based email
8. Blue sky features:
   • Output uses XML and gets formatted into [X]HTML via XSLT; "themeable"/"skinnable" interface
   • Conferencing/other functionality available via XML-RPC or SOAP calls
   • News page creation (see Slash, Squishdot, Scoop)
   • Member trust metrics (see Slashdot "karma," Scoop "mojo," Advogato distributed trust metric) (Feature indefinitely shelved at the request of the EMinds community)
   • User diary pages (see Advogato, Kuro5hin)
   • Moderated discussions (see Slash, Scoop)
   • Collaborative database facility (see Wiki, Everything2)
   • Content management/distributed publishing