by Matthew Lam, Jeffrey Wood and David Cole: gotsurf.github.io/

You can see our app running here

Goals

• Provide forum-style support for students taking ICS courses at UH Manoa
• Questions and answers with context
• Encouraging students reach out for help
• Learning by teaching

Services

• Provide a StackOverflow-style forum with questions organized by ICS course
• Students can navigate to a course and ask or answer questions pertaining to that course

Walkthrough

• Landing Page
• Signup
• Ask a Question
• Post an Answer
• Rate a Question or Answer
• Subscribe to a Course
• Admin Functionality

Landing

The landing page has a full searchable list of courses and questions where each question belongs to a course, therefore giving it a particular context.

Signup

To ask questions and post answers you must have an account first. To sign up, click the top right navbar link that says login.

Then click sign up.

Ask a Question

From the landing, click on a course to navigate to its course page, there you can click Add Question to post a question for that course.

Post an Answer

Once a question is listed in the course page, you can click on it to view the full question page. There you can post an answer with a similar modal function.

Rate a Question or Answer

On the question page, you can rate both the question and its answers by upvoting or downvoting. One vote per user per posted item. Votes are also changeable.

Subscribe to a Course and Personal Pages

Clicking the subscribe button on a course page will add that course to your My Courses page.

Similarly, all your posted questions can be view in My Questions…

…and Answers in My Answers

Admin Functionality

Admin users are defined in the settings.development.json file before the app is first launched. The Admin page allows the removal of any question or answer from the site and should be used for moderating.

Dev Guide

To run this app locally use the following instructions (assuming you have node installed).

You must first install Meteor.

Then download a copy of the app.

Once downloaded, open up a command line interface and navigate to the app/ directory and run:

meteor npm install

meteor npm run start

Community Feedback

alexcw@hawaii.edu said: The only thing I could find is if one line of question trails is too long, it will trail off. I recommended limiting the line size and having it wrap. It looked good.

sabines@hawaii.edu said: It is a great app. It’s very easy to navigate and I did not encounter any problems. I was really impressed.

deantf@hawaii.edu said: I thought it was really cool and wished the site would go live. It would have really helped me during the semester.

tyu@hawaii.edu said: I really liked the animation and found that the site worked great! I thought it might be cool if users had their question and answer count next to their name Also, it might be a good idea if people were only allowed to rate one time.

tcchong@hawaii.edu said: I liked what I saw. I encountered no problems and found the app really useful. I thought it was a really great app.

Milestone 1: Page Mockups

https://github.com/gotsurf/manoa-overflow/projects/1

Landing

The landing page will have all courses and include a search bar in the future.

Course Page

Each course page will have all questions pertaining to that particular course listed.

Question Page

Questions will have answers posted below. Both questions and answers have a voted rating out of 5 stars.

Milestone 2: Functionality and Refined UI

https://github.com/gotsurf/manoa-overflow/projects/2

Landing

Landing page now has two tabs, one to browse all courses and the other for all questions, each with a search bar.

Course Page

You can add a question from the course page within a modal.

Once added the question is visible in the questions list within the course page.

Clicking on a question will navigate to its page.

On the question page you can provide an answer.

And voila! We have a forum!

My Courses

Clicking the subscribe button on a course page will save that course to your favorites.

You can view these saved courses in “My Courses”.

My Questions and Answers

You can also view all questions you’ve asked and answers youve given with links to their original pages and course homepages.

Milestone 3: Admin and Additional Functionality

https://github.com/gotsurf/manoa-overflow/projects/3

Landing Animation

Improved landing graphics for a more professional look including CSS animations. See it live here.

Ratings

Questions and Answers can now be voted up or down.

Delete Questions and Answers

Ability to delete questions and answers:

• Deleting a question removes all ratings for the question as well as all answers and corresponding ratings from the database.
• Deleting an answer will remove all its ratings from the database as well as itself.
• Clicking delete will render a confirm modal first since we are actually removing from the db instead of simply archiving (in order to save space in our free sandbox db).
• Currently only available to admin/moderators since the action is irreversible.

Admin Interface

Admin interface to view all questions and answers and delete them from the database.