Forum support

[nygrenh]

• [x] Design
• [ ] Implementation

Support for forum discussions.

Options

Option A: Integrate an existing open source project like Discourse.

• Good: Basic commenting and moderation features already implemented
• Bad: Administrative costs — have to keep a foreign codebase running reliably
• Bad: Less control over the user experience — might be the biggest deal breaker. Some things like the ux for anonymous posting, integration with other parts of the system will require a custom design for the quality of service we're going to need.
• Bad: High resource usage compared to the rest of the system. Here's an example of resource usage with relatively low load:

  NAME                                   CPU(cores)   MEMORY(bytes)
  cms-55b785d7db-s4nlj                   14m          66Mi
  course-material-7d777b744b-gp7qj       16m          59Mi
  discourse-5c5cf665fb-cdsx4             407m         1353Mi
  discourse-postgresql-0                 3m           39Mi
  discourse-redis-master-0               9m           4Mi
  example-exercise-7697877fc4-h5prk      5m           56Mi
  headless-lms-566cd87444-jth67          24m          35Mi
  main-frontend-f597bb7c4-xjfdw          36m          66Mi
  postgres-0                             29m          48Mi
  quizzes-6c4d467499-nqls5               5m           54Mi
  regrader-846f89c89f-h7n7g              1m           8Mi
  service-info-fetcher-b675655d9-g25hg   1m           10Mi

Option B: Custom solution

• Bad: Have to implement basic commenting and moderation features
• Good: full control over the user experience
• Good: small resource overhead
• Good: No need for special knowledge for maintaining the system

Verdict

I'd go with option B -- we don't need that many features from existing solutions but would like to integrate deeply to the rest of the system. Also custom design is very important to us.

Ideas

• Students should be able to post either with their own name or with a nickname. The nickname option is to lower the barrier for posting.
• Should have support for forum posts that are only public for the students of a course -- many people are not confortable with posting to a public forum.
• Support for threaded conversation. Inspiration:
  • https://lobste.rs/s/vwhlgp/fast_rust_builds
  • https://github.com/vercel/next.js/discussions/19065
• Main forum interface should be in its own page
• Forum posts should be embeddable to a page.
• Posts from teachers and teaching assistants should have some kind of visual indication so that it's easy to see they're not students.

[nygrenh]

The design should contain:

• Topic list
• Posts view (threading like in the examples and reactions with emoji)