# Design Goals for the Venice Project

Eric J. Bowersox <erbo@silcom.com> - January 26, 2001

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