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- In the beginning, there was Asbot for the first version of 6.002x.
- When we made a site for multiple courses, we discovered that Asbot didn't support multiple courses with different discussion forums well.
- Amondo Fox from Berkeley decided to write something.
- So originally written by a team (grad student and undergrads) at Berkeley.
- They set up the original architecture, which we still have.
Comments Service (basically a data store from the LMS perspective)
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- UX designers: Marco and then Brian
June 2013 -> Aug 2014,
- Forums team was formed: Greg, Jim, and Kevin (a contractor just for a few months).
- Forums performance improvement: 5 second timeout between LMS and Comments Service happening for over 1% of the requests.
- Heroku is not great for scaling.
- Introduction threads didn't perform well. They would get 1000-2000 comments for just saying "Hi!"
- supported them with infinite scroll rather than paging
- UX issues: front-end wouldn't tell you if there was an error. The UI would just continue to spin. There are still some front-end deficiencies there.
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