What features will such a platform have? What modules provide these features? And what work is needed to wrangle these modules together?

Nobody goes to the front page. Everyone hangs out in the forum People don't use the chat, or the gallery Wants to have a dashboard on the front page

• The latest shoutboxes
• The latest forum posts
• The Latest followed items
• The latest blog comments
• the latest group posts (organized by group on page)
• Stats FAQs Need a way for newbies to understand what's available/get a lay of the land. Featured blog post/product review/product setup Need a way to build community - don't add too many features that people won't use Simplicity
  • Can't be overwhelming for new visitors Wants the important content to fit within one screen

Want people to find us easily Got to be easy! Can't take too much time.

Need a "sticky" site - needs to have content that people will want to revisit

Need an easy way to communicate. - email distro list?

• Twitter-like communication
  • Global communication
  • Direct communication

Events calendar Needs to be easy to edit Leader needs automation/prompts to stay on top of the community The way that meetup sets up the next meeting at a scheduled time

Probably need a dues-paying or donation mechanism

Reduce the friction for people to participate Don't make the users register in order to leave a comment or ask a question

Need to be able to find people in the community who can answer my particular questions (newbie podcaster versus someone who's looking for a microphone) Need a good feedback loop - direct feedback to the community organizer

Things we need to keep in mind What's important to the community? What are the features admin front end user experience advertising design content general bugs categories one might be able to vote on Contributions/"I can do" section What I can contribute (&if I have help)

Social networking

• Who's your friend? Who's just watching you?
  • modules: Buddylist, Relationships
    • User relationships looks great, but seems very incomplete (at least in Drupal 5.x)
• What are they doing
  • modules: Activity for onsite, Activity Streams for offsite

Discovery

• Who is like you?
  • modules: Neighbors
  • Self-tagging a profile as "Interests"
• What content is like this content?
  • modules: Similar, Related Content
• What content would you like?
• What groups would be of interest

Groups

• Allow users to create arbitrary groups, like Yahoo Groups
• Email integration (mail to group, receive mail from groups)
  • Mailhandler module?
• Group discovery -- How to find a group that you'd like
  • Broad classification for a top level (mozdex categories?)
  • Tagging of groups
  • Show groups that most of your friends belong to
  • Show groups that match your interests (see: user tags under Discovery, above)
• modules: Organic Groups, OG forums

Sandbox a user's content

• Make monthly archives, tags, related content, etc for a single user AND for the group
• Learn something from og.module on this?

Personal Profiles

• More than an about me, pictures, and comments
• Persons interests and relativism to the community surrounding the profile
• Default profiles should be easily tailorable to the community that is implementing the platform

Advertising

• Restrict to systems with an API ** Because it's easier ** Amazon ** AdSense ** Kontera
• Community owner will decide where ads run ** User splits may depend on * # points, # blog posts, age, etc.
• Blocks can be defined as hidden or shown
• Template determines positioning
• Splits are determined by the ComManager
• Affiliate links are pre-populated w/ account owner's preferred links
• If the ComManager doesn't define an affiliate account, $ can go back to foundation
• Give the option to donate X% of ad traffic to foundation
• Define different percentages of revenue by role (& individual?)
• Want to know which of my users is making me the most money? ** Could know by traffic stats? ** Or maybe track by URL
• No flash ads (this could be a configuration option)
• Theme background color needs to be tied into ad color (at least for AdSense)
• Configuration option: load ads in same window or new browser window

Spam Killing

• Captchas on registering
• Captchas on contact forms
• Akismet for spam comment blocking and spam content blocking

I wish Akismet stopped everything. It seems to be getting worse lately, so you'll also need:

• Quick and easy blocking of users
• Quick and easy blocking of IP's
• Flagging of stories by users / trusted users
• http://mollom.com/