History

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)

LMS

Browser

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.

Discussion Content

Markdown
- We use an open-source markdown editing tool.
- markdown format stored
White-list of HTML tags
- honored on the browser-side when rendering the content
- possible to store non-white-listed tags if hackre circumvents browser, but the browser on the reader's end will filter out those tags
Mathjax
- math formula renderer implemented in JS on the client-side

Future