Challenge
Student life is discussed in messenger chats, and a chat is a badly built memory. An answer about a lecturer sinks in twenty minutes, next year's first-year student will never find it, and search indexes none of it. The job was to keep conversations from disappearing and to make them findable by the people they were meant for.
Solution
The community is laid out on three levels: region, university, faculty. A student lands in their own section rather than a general feed, among people who share their curriculum and their lecturers.
Discussions are organised as threads instead of a stream of messages, so an answer lives as long as it is useful and can still be found a year after it was written.
Architecture and implementation
A catalogue of regions, universities and faculties carries the structure. Threads hold discussion with replies and quoting, participants have profiles and reputation, and moderation with a complaints flow keeps the place usable. Search runs across discussions, and the addresses and markup were built so the content could be indexed at all.
Result
The site launched in 2023. We stopped developing it, but the shape of a community with a hierarchy of sections and live moderation carries anywhere: from an industry forum to an internal question-and-answer base inside a company.
