I want to design a reusable community website to address the issues I’ve seen in the Allegro community. I’ve considered several models to demonstrate the community, and I’ve settled on a competition manager site. I have a design in my head, and I’ll be using this blog entry as a way to keep track of my thoughts. Firstly, there will be a forum.

Forum

A forum is a hub for community activities. I believe that you don’t need an activity to generate a community, but that you need a community to generate an activity. With this in mind, the central component of my competition manager will be a forum.

The forum will be a collection of boards, each of which holds a list of threads, which are a collection of posts. On the central forum, users can create new threads on a particular board, and can post replies to any thread that isn’t locked, which happens after 1 week of no one posting in it, but a user cannot post more than once to a single thread in a row. These settings may be changed on a per-board or per-thread basis.

All user-entered content—such as posts—will be entered using Textile, which I just love. Posts can have any number of attachments as well.

Wiki

The wiki will be used to store persistent information, related to the individual competitions. Wiki pages can be edited by anyone and may have attachments. These settings can be changed on a per-competition basis.

Each wiki page will have a thread to facilitate discussion about the page.

Competitions

The site will host different types of competitions. Competitions consist of a collection of wiki pages (describing the rules of the competition, scheduling, etc., but there are no actual requirements for this). Each competition also has two or more boards: one is a pseudo-board containing the threads for the wiki pages belonging to the competition, and the rest are individual discussion boards.

Competitions also have rules, and instances. A rule is a small text block that anyone can edit. They can be access controlled or not, and categorized. Each instance can have a begin date, at which time a rules generator can be spun, or rules can be hand-selected ahead of time.

Each instance can have registrants who upload a final product, according to whatever size and format requirements are necessary.

That’s all I really feel like writing about. I will work out the details as I get closer to them.