Requirements: MVP

Use this page to record requirements we have agreed on for the MVP. Use the forum for discussions.

There are some seed ideas for functional requirements.

Functional Requirements

Posts:

• We will have some form of up/down voting on posts. (source)
• We will allow posts to be closed and deleted; details of closure TBD. (source)
• We should develop and maintain an editing culture. (source)
• We will support CommonMark. (source)

Tags (source):

• Each question has 1–5 tags.
• Tag names are alphanumerics and a few punctuation signs.
• Each tag has an optional text description. (Wiki is not required for MVP but nice to have.)
• Anybody with a certain privilege can create a tag.
• Anybody with a certain privilege can edit tag descriptions.
• People can browse the list of tags.

Comments:

• Comments should exist, but with low visibility. (source)
• It should be possible to ping a user (or even better: a few users) from a comment. This will result in a notification. (source)
• Comments are threaded. (source)

Moderation:

• Flagging of posts and comments. (source)

Reputation and privileges (source ad loc):

• We do not display a single user reputation number even if we compute one under the hood.
• We do display whatever “stats” we’re tracking for privileges on the user profile page.
• User can see their progress toward a particular privilege on the help page for that privilege.
• (more about privileges TBD in other threads)

User profile:

• Contains the following elements (source)
  • Username
  • Free-form profile text
  • Own activity log
  • Optional associated Stack Exchange account
• Nice to have but not MVP: avatar

Interface:

• Support for localization, meaning a place to hook it in. MVP does not require actually localizing anything non-English, just that there be a path. (source)
• Search: (source)
  • Text-only on-site search.
  • Show and search all questions within a tag.

Customization of site design (source):

• Sites are able to change their color set and header images.
• Sites can customize CSS.

Legal:

• We will handle legal requests manually to begin with. (source)
• We must have legal policies in place in MVP, to include information on GDPR, DMCA, and contact details for legal requests. (source)
• We must have a way to indicate the license of an individual post if different from the site default. (source; this is for imported content not content created directly on a Codidact site)

Stack

See: Technology-Stack

Community building

There will not be a formal community creation process in MVP. We will start with existing Stack Exchange communities for now. (source)

Meta discussion communities (source)

• We have meta sites for discussions about the community and the software. They either use a Q&A-based approach or a more discussion-oriented one.
• We need to have instance-level discussions (network meta) and community-level (per-site meta) discussion sites.
• The instance-level and the community-level meta discussion forums should be separate for now (contentious point; decision based on like-score)
• Meta sites should be freely and easily accessible.