SYNOPSIS

Online Student Forum

XXXXXX of Computer Application

Of
XXXXX UNIVERSITY

By

Mr XXXXX CXXXXXX
Roll No : 54XXX06
Course :XXXX.IT
Semester : 6th

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 Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION............................................................................................................................................3
OBJECTIVE...................................................................................................................................................4
PROJECT SCOPE AND MODULES...........................................................................................................5
EXTERNAL USERS......................................................................................................................................5
WITHOUT LOGIN:.......................................................................................................................................5
WITH LOGIN:...............................................................................................................................................5
ADMIN USER:...............................................................................................................................................6
PROBLEM DEFINITION.............................................................................................................................7
DRAWBACKS IN EXISTING LEARNING SYSTEM..............................................................................7
ONLINE STUDENT FORUM BENEFITS..................................................................................................8
LITERATURE REVIEW..............................................................................................................................9
SOLUTION ARCHITECTURE..................................................................................................................11
ONLINE STUDENT FORUM USE CASE................................................................................................14
PERT CHART..............................................................................................................................................16
ONLINE STUDENT FORUM DATA DICTIONARY..............................................................................17
ER DIAGRAM..............................................................................................................................................22
DATA FLOW DIAGRAM - DFD................................................................................................................23
CONCLUSION AND FUTURE ENHANCEMENT.................................................................................25
BIBLIOGRAPHY.........................................................................................................................................27
Books.............................................................................................................................27

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INTRODUCTION

The popularity of internet and increase in use of internet, there is lots of scope in online
bulletin board system which known as form. Discussion forum is one of the most
efficient web tool used for communication on internet by posting a question and waiting
for comment or answer. It have lot of information in the form of user generated content
which is stored at different locations.

The purpose of the project is to develop the web application for posting a question and a
comment on discussion forum. Various related work that have been done and their gaps in
the use of Online Student Discussion Board as its name implies it is a Discussion Board
and covers most of areas. Here a user can register his/her name with this site and can
throw their views and also can get others too. We have tried to cover most of areas which
can attract many users to this site.

The objective and scope of my Project Student Forum System is to record the details
various activities of user. It will simplifies the task and reduce the paper work. During
implementation every user will be given appropriate training to suit their specific needs.
Specific support will also be provided at key points within the academic calendar.
Training will be provided on a timely basis, and you will be trained as the new is Student
Forum System rolled out to your area of responsibility. A complete board system (forum)
that allows the user access to a friendly and intuitive interface online. It offer complete
web based forum administration.

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OBJECTIVE

Online Student Forum – It is a complete end to end solution to cover all aspects of online
forum for education institute.

The basic objective of developing this project is:

 The Online Student Forum that has been designed to provide a complete system
to control and monitor forum activity.

 Online Student Forum should have dynamic forum where admin can update and
create new topic, forum and monitor.

 Complete web based administration,

 Developed in PHP and MySQL widely used open source web application
developed tool..

 We have two types of users on this web application. The administrator and student

 System must have transactional data, and all the update and delete operation must
be recorded for audit purpose.

 No limitation of post, category and topics, User friendly design.

 System has powerful logical access management in place, each user must be
identified by login id and strict password policy is applied to secure the system

 Administrator can view and edit the users, post and activate and deactivate the
post, users if required

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Project Scope and Modules
External Users

Without Login:
 View Discussion Board
 View topics
 View posts
 View site information
 View board rules
 Can register
 View FAQ
 Make simple search
With Login:
 View board
 View topics
 View posts
 Can start new topic
 Can make a new post
 Can delete his/her posts
 Can edit his/her profile
 Can see others member’s profile
 View site information
 View board rules

Special Users( called moderator in forum websites)

 A moderator can enjoy all the rights which can be enjoyed by the registered users.
Moreover he/she has been given some special rights as mention below:
 A moderator will have one category to moderate.
 A moderator will have rights like delete all thread, delete all posts, and lock a
particular thread in his /her category area.

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Admin User:
 Block user
 View all board
 View all Topic
 View all posts
 Can start new category
 Can delete category
 Can delete all topics
 Can delete all posts
 Can inactive categories
 Can make ban on users
 Can promote a user from common user to moderator
 Can demote a user from moderator to common user
 Can see all moderator lists
 Can inactive moderator for a particular time
 Can make an announcement
 Can edit site profile

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Problem Definition

Formal learning refers to hierarchically structured learning in which acquiring knowledge

and skills at the official educational institutions through primary intermediate and higher
education programmers and informal learning describes a lifelong process whereby
individuals acquire information, knowledge, values, skills, behaviour and attitudes from
daily experience and the educational influences and resources from family neighbours
and work place. In the present times, it is estimate that there is 20% knowledge is through
formal learning and 80% is through informal learning

In today’s internet world, student wants to connect other student, teacher, wants to learn
and share knowledge. In formal education student can contact his teacher, other student
during school time also not able to clear his all doubt. In proposed system student can
post their query, question from any where any time, other student and teacher can provide
answer from any where, any time.

Drawbacks in Existing Learning System

 Student can not contact other student, teacher from his home
 Student can ask question only in class room.
 During holidays, off days student can not contact teacher to clarify his doubt
 Student can not express his view, knowledge on his subject
 Teacher can not share information to all student at a time
 Student from different location can not connect each other

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Online Student Forum Benefits

 Web based application, student can use this application by 24X7 and 365 days.
 Student can post doubt questions from any where in holidays, off days
 Complete end to end solution to manage discussion board.
 Developed in PHP/MySQL which is widely used web development tools
 System can support any numbers of users and post.
 Admin user can monitor and edit post, if require.
 Admin user can block, un-block users, if require.
 Store historical data for audit purpose.
 All modify operation will keep log for security with timestamp, user name.
 Roll based access rights to each and every option to keep better control
mechanism in the system and hence prevent unauthorised access of sensitive data.
 The software should have authentication mechanism of username and password
 Users can change their password
 The system administrator can add and delete users, if require
 System can operate multiple users user environment within a LAN/WAN network
 The software should display pop up confirming action of users

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Literature Review

Features of discussion forum

 Locus of control - Open to collaboration i.e. Decentralized and group

 Post - Are owned by groups with equal responsibilities
 Aim - Aim is to provide support to public to discuss on any topic.
 Content (Static/dynamic) - It provide static content: once posted the posting
doesn't change (answers are provided by others)
 Way of display - Content is organized and presented in different ways
 Comments or answers - Both are required
 Intent - The intent is decision making (used more to provide support)
 Login required to see the content - Optional
 Uploading/ Downloading - No allowed
 Personal profile - Optional
 Content posts - Queries and answers
 Examples - Yahoo answers

Discussion forum is become essential tool of web. Various authors have discussed the
design of discussion forums, and how discussion forums work. Some of the major works
are discussed below:

Andrew Arnt et al. states that large message and posts may produce information
overloading problem. This problem can be resolved by moderator which is based on
naive Bayes classifier that can be trained by a set of moderated comments in an online
forum and then used to predict, with high accuracy, the expected moderations of
unlabeled comments in that same forum. This classifier can then be used to augment the
existing moderation scheme, addressing inherent scarcity problems

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Yulei Zhang et al. creates a Dark Web Forums Portal which is a heterogeneous forum that
collected data from different Jihadist forums. System designing of dark web forums
portal containing Data acquisition, Data preparation, several analysis functions including
single and multiple forums searching, browsing, statistics analysis, multilingual
translation, and then social network visualization. This forum used for providing the
information to the users quickly and effectively

Mikołaj Morzy. Introduce a framework for mining Internet forums which is to provide
users with automatic means of discovering useful knowledge from these vast amounts of
textual data. It consists of two levels of analysis: statistical and network analysis. For
each level of the analysis the basic statistics used to construct a given level have been
identified. The statistics identified are topic, post and user which are used to define
activity, controversy, popularity and other work

Namita Mittal et al. describe that In the web forum, crawling is used to collect the
relevant information from different webpages. It crawls all the pages URLs that represent
web forum. Out of these pages some of them are redundant pages, invalid pages and
some require the authorization to access the login pages. For the efficient and effective
searching, remove all those URLs pages having those errors and reconstruct the web
forum. Other errors may be connection error, text error and number error. To overcome
these problems, it convert HTML page into DOM tree and generate wrappers which used
cluster based on similarity between templates. It separate and remove redundancy and
errors among the pages for effective and efficient information retrieval from web forums

Qing gao states special and effective vertical crawler for web forum. This crawler is
different from General and focused crawler in which general crawler is used to meet
common users demand and focused crawler is used for filter useless information. Vertical
crawler can get structured information from web pages, filtering out the useless
information and show users the most valuable web resources. It adapts the template based
processing method for regular expression to get structure information like title, author,
number of replies that are saved into post information table

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Solution Architecture

Infrastructure

Type Software Hardware

Work Station/ Node 1. Windows 7 1. P-4
2. Internet Explorer 2. RAM -1 GB
3. Support Cookies

Database Server 1.Win 2008 server 1.Dual Processor P-4

2.MySQL 5.5 2.RAM- 2GB
3.Hard Disk-160GB
4.RAID
Web Server 1.Win 2008 Advance Server 1. Dual Processor P-4
2. IIS 2.RAM- 2GB
3. PHP 3.Hard Disk-40GB

Data Base Server Web Server

Internet

Workstation 1 Workstation 2 Workstation 3 Workstation N

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Development Tools and Technologies

Front End
1. PHP

Why PHP?
The full form of PHP is “Hypertext Preprocessor” it’s original name was
“Personal Home Page”. Resume Lerdorf software engineer, Apache team member
is the creator and original driving force behind PHP. The first part of PHP was
developed for his personal use in late 1994.By the middle of 1997, PHP was
beginning used approximately 50,000 sites worldwide.PHP is server side scripting
Language like ASP, which can be embedded in HTML Tags or used as stand-
alone. PHP is an open source software (OSS) PHP files have a file extension of “.
Php” or “. Php3” or “phtml”. PHP doesn’t do anything about what a page looks
and sound like. In fact, most of what PHP does is invisible to the end
user.Someone looking at a PHP page will necessarily be able to tell that it was not
written purely in HTML, because usually the result of PHP is HML. PHP supports
many advantages.

Back End
MySQL

Why MySQL?

MySQL is a relational database management system (RDBMS) that runs as a

server providing multi-user access to a number of databases. The MySQL
development project has made its source code available under the terms of the
GNU General Public License, as well as under a variety of proprietary
agreements. MySQL is owned and sponsored by a single for-profit firm, the
Swedish company MySQL AB, now owned by Oracle Corporation. Free-software
projects that require a full-featured database management system often use
MySQL. Such projects include (for example) WordPress, phpBB, Drupal and
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 other software built on the LAMP software stack. MySQL is also used in many
high-profile, large-scale World Wide Web products including Wikipedia, Google
and Facebook.

Scripting
1. Java Script
For client side validation.

Designing and Style

1. HTML
Basic web site designing.

2. CSS
Used to give consistent looks.

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Online Student Forum Use Case

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Gantt chart:

PH AS E TIME RE Q UIRE D (IN WEE K S )

WK 1 WK 2 WK 3 WK 4 WK 5 WK 6

REQ UIRE ME NT
G AT HE RING
REQ UIRE ME NT
ANALYS IS
DES IG N

CO DING

TE ST ING

IMPL E ME NTA-
TIO N

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Pert Chart

Req.Gathering Analysis Design

01 Feb – 08 Feb 08 Feb-15 Feb 15 Feb-25 Feb

Wk 1 Wk2 Wk3+4days

Coding

25 Feb – 03 Mar
Wk 4

Testing

03 Mar –13Mar
Wk5+4days

Implementation

13 Mar–20Mar
Wk6

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Online Student Forum Data Dictionary

db_user:

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db_icons:

db_cats:

db_visits:

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db_posts:

db_sessions:

db_subscription:

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db_reply:

db_topic:

db_settings:

db_smilies:

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ER Diagram

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Data Flow Diagram - DFD

Context Diagram:

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Conclusion and future enhancement

The development of Web and mobile technologies encourages people to share individual
opinions. Web users can participate in a discussion forum platform to express themselves
and interact with other users on specific interests. This contribute to a lot of user
generated information which is distributed over many forums. Due to this, it is not easy
to find specific information from discussion forums. A review of various methods of
posting, commenting, searching the queries and the way to answer the questions (i.e.
queries) on online discussion forums from different researchers has been done. The
research gaps in the previous work are examined and are listed above.

This project was developed to fulfill user and business requirement; however there are
lots of scope to improve the performance of the Online Student Forum in the area of user
interface, database performance, and query processing time. Discussion forums have lot
of information in the form of user generated content which is stored at different locations.
This distributed information can be aggregated at a single place and can be used by users
for learning. Additionally, collaboration with other web tools like weblogs, Wikis and
RSS etc can be done to enhance the power of eLearning. Also, people spend lot of time
on social networks, so it is advisable to combine discussion forum with social networking
sites for better learning experiences through which user can easily access the information
of the forums.

So there are many things for future enhancement of this project. The future enhancements
that are possible in the project are as follows.

 The mobile will become the most frequent medium used in the next few years,
focus should give this application to make mobile friendly.
 Connect to facebook, likedin and other social networking sites
 Connecting to other social book mark sites
 Posting of photos and videos
 Can make information more accurate
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  Email alert
 24/7 access to information
 Fit into larger knowledge management initiative
 SMS integration

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Bibliography

Websites

 http://www.google.com
 http://www.microsoft.com
 http://www.programmer2programmer.net
 http://www.codeproject.com
 http://www.msdn.com.
 http://www.w3schools.com
 http://www.php.com

Books

 PHP Manual
 JavaScript Manual
 MySQL Manual

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