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)
- written in Ruby
- data store in Mongo
- text search in Elastic Search
- all updates need to update both Mongo and Elastic Search
LMS
- originally written by Dave to provide a higher-level interface
- lms/lib/comment_client
- handles all communication to comment service
- lms/djangoapps/django_comment_client
- provides the django views
- common/djangoapps/django_comment_common
- has role and permission data
- stored in RDS (mySQL) in its own tables
- table of very granular permissions
- e.g., open/close thread
- in practice, only (really) 2 roles with 2 permissions each
- Student
- Privileged User
- Administrators
- Moderators
- originally, all permissions, except grant/revoke moderator role
- but, these roles are managed in instructor dashboard so no need for separation between Moderator and Administrator
- Community TAs
- same as moderator role, except surfaced role name is different when displayed on a thread
Browser
Then, Kevin, a contractor took on some of this work.
June 2013 -> Aug 2014, Forums team was formed: Greg, Jim, and Kevin (just for a few months).
- Forums performance improvement: 5 second timeout between LMS and Comments Service happening for over 1% of the requests.
- 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.