Discussion Board

Description

Active Data Online Discussion Board is an advanced, n-tier, database-driven discussion board software for Microsoft asp.net 3.5.

The system is the first to integrate forums, blogs, statements, questions, events, polls, files and pictures seamlessly and sensibly. It is also the first to offer topic templates for customisation and extensibility.

Use Discussion Board to create large online communities, discussion groups, virtual offices, collaborative workspaces, customer support centers, question-and-answer sites, group calendars, file shares, picture galleries, social networks, online video discussion sites, and more.

The system requires an asp.net 3.5 capable Web server, an SMTP email server, and a relational database, either Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Access, MySQL, PostgreSQL, or Oracle.

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Key benefits

Why choose Active Data Online Discussion Board?

It is quite possibly the most comprehensive discussion board, forum, or bulletin board system on the market. It offers more features than any other system, even artificial intelligence.
It is database neutral. It supports 5 different relational databases: Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Access, Oracle 10g, PostgreSQL and MySQL. This means you won't be locked into a single database vendor.
It runs on Microsoft asp.net 3.5, which is the fastest and most powerful Web application platform today.
It is secure. It is protected from known hacking attacks.
Its architecture is clean, flexible, extensible and scalable. The separation of layers is evident from the fact that a forum can be rendered in several ways: the standard view, a picture gallery, a file server, and a calendar. It is extensible in the sense that administrators are the ones who define user profile fields. Moreover, administrators can create new kinds of topics through HTML templates, topics such as embedded videos, Flash objects, Silverlight elements, and more. The system's scalability owes much to a well designed data paging algorithm.
It is self contained. The system does not depend on any external web services or the like, which means there is no risk of your discussion board not working when some other server stops working.
It is fully localised, meaning the system can be translated and run in a language other than English.
It is a robust, cross browser application. The user interface is largely the same in Microsoft Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera. There are no menus or editors driven by DHTML, or the like, that can fail to work in some environments.
It is fast. The UI renders quickly because the system does not have any ascx user controls. What's more, the system will only fetch the data it needs when it needs it.
It uses ajax or asynchronous javascript and xml, the technology that has become synonymous with Web 2.0.
It is user friendly and comes with a user guide. The user guide is extensible because it is stored in XML.
It is simple to set up. If you need help, user support is available and free. The fact that it is provided free of charge is testament to the simplicity of the setup process.
It is search engine friendly. The crawlers of google, yahoo, msn, and others, can reach and index all publicly viewable content.
It offers strong anti-spam and anti-flooding measures, and tools for administering content and users.
It can integrate with another asp.net 3.5 system. By design, it can run either in its own application space or in a shared application space.
It offers several ways to authenticate and manage users, including a single sign-in solution for complex, multiple application environments.
It can be hosted on an inexpensive Web host. Since the system natively supports Microsoft Access and all files are put on the Web server instead of in the database, the minimum cost of running a Discussion Board is probably the lowest of its ilk. Of course, over time, as your site grows, you can switch over to a high-end database such as SQL Server or Oracle.
It offers two built-in ways to earn money whilst hosting a discussion board: paid topics and forum subscriptions. What's more, its HTML plugin architecture makes embedding google adsense ads simple.

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Current version

Version: 6.0

Release: 26 February 2008

Note: If you are an existing customer you may be entitled to the current version free of charge, per Active Data Online's version policy.

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Flash videos

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Demonstration

Customer support forum and test area (Access)
A test board* with administrator rights (Access)
For an example of a larger discussion board, see the player community of the
perfectcompetition.net business simulation game (SQL Server)
For another example, see the user community of the chess openings database (SQL Server)

* This board will be cleared completely every now and again. You can use this board to try out the admin and moderator tools. The board has been set up so that the user with ID 1 will have admin rights. You can't upload files on this board, and you can't access the log files as administrator. If the board isn't cleared, you can ask for it to be cleared.

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Features

DiscussionBoard is possibly the most advanced, scalable and complete discussion and collaboration software on the market today.

DiscussionBoard supports Microsoft SQL Server 2000 and 2005, Oracle 10g, MySQL 5.0, PostgreSQL 8.2 and Microsoft Access relational databases.
The system can store and provide unlimited groups, forums, topics, discussions, statements, questions, polls, events, pictures, files, replies, user-to-user messages, and support unlimited users. It suits a corporate, intranet environment as well as an open Internet environment.
The integration of discussions, statements, questions, polls, events, pictures and files is seamless. Forums can be made to accept all types of topics or be restricted to only accept one or a few.
"Discussions" are threaded discussions. Users can reply to the discussion starter or to replies within the discussion.
"Statements" are topics without post comments or replies at all. Statements can have a picture and thus can be used as a form of classified ads.
"Questions" are text-only topics that seek an answer. Each user can answer once. Users cannot reply to other answers. If a question is marked as answered by the user who asked the question, or by a moderator, the topic becomes read only and new answers cannot be posted. Questions are useful for managing a knowledgebase.
"Polls" are essentially tallied surveys, or in other words, close-ended questions. Users can only vote once in a poll. Poll results are counted in real time and displayed in a bar chart.
"Events" are calendar entries, and can form the basis of a threaded discussion. Events are identified by date and time and can be categorised. Discussion Board includes a monthly view and a daily planner view. The planner can be used to see when all events for a day starts and ends, and if there are any overlaps.
"Pictures" are digital images, and can form the basis of a threaded discussion. The system will automatically resize, crop and thumbnail images. File types and sizes can be set by administrators. Thus, the system can support high resolution images (high bandwidth / MB) often found at photography and art sites, and low resolution images (low bandwidth / MB) often preferred by those wanting to keep hosting costs down.
"Files" are binary or text files, and can form the basis of a threaded discussion. File types and sizes can be set by administrators. Files can include documents such as doc and pdf, and music such as mp3 and wav, and video such as wmv and ram.
The aforementioned topics are not the only types of topics that are possible. The system includes topic templates. These are HTML templates defined and described by administrators. A template can have one or more parameter markers. The parameters are what users key in when posting the topic. As a result, it is possible to extend Discussion Board to host all kinds of topics -- eg, embedded YouTube videos, a javascript chess board for reviewing and discussing a game, structured data, a table of numbers, charts, etc. Anything that can render in a web browser is possible.
Users can spend up to 1 hour composing topics and replies, thus there is no need to hurry or write a draft elsewhere and then cut and paste into the editor. The system will keep a user's session state alive for up to 1 hour using ajax when the user is in an editor.
Users can attach files in replies by using "linked replies". Linked replies can also be used to attach other kinds of topics such as questions, polls and events to a topic.
When a user is composing a reply or a linked reply to a topic, if another user posts something in the same topic, the user composing the reply will be notified within a few seconds. The system uses ajax to check for posts. This is helpful because if you are writing something in response to a discussion and the discussion changes before you finish, you might want to rewrite or at least review what you've written before posting it.
Forums that only accept pictures can be made to appear as a picture gallery, complete with cropped and anti-aliased thumbnails.
Forums that only accept events can be made to appear as a calendar.
Forums that only accept files can be made to appear as a file server.
There is a daily posts section which is essentially a blog of the entire discussion board. Every topic and reply that is posted on a given day is presented as a blog entry for that day. This area is useful for finding out what's new at a glance.
Each forum be made to generate an RSS feed of new posts.
Users can conveniently search for posts in a forum using the real-time, unindexed search engine. Search keywords are highlighted in results.
The system uses a proprietary data paging algorithm that is efficient and scalable.
The system supports all unicode character sets. Thus, it can accept, store and present information in any language.
The user interface is localised: the interface can be configured to read in any language, including languages that use non Western alphabets (eg, Chinese). The localised strings are stored in a text file for convenience and are cached once loaded into the application. The system ships with an English strings file. If you would like to run discussion board in another language you must translate the text on the right hand side of the equal sign of every line in the strings file .
There is a comprehensive administration system. Administrators can manage content and users via a Web browser.
Administrators can easily bring up a list of every post ever made by a user. The system can also generate a word cloud of the list of posts so that administrators can see at a glance what the user has been posting about.
Administrators can see the DNS history and sign in times of individual users.
The system can be set up to log the IPs of recent viewers -- that is, views in the last X hours where X is configurable.
Individual forums and/or topics can be made read only, and reversed.
Individual forums and/or topics can be suspended (that is, removed from users' view), and reversed.
A forum can have moderators - a moderator is a type of user who can censor, delete or move posts in the forum that he or she is moderating.
A forum can be screened; that is to say, a forum can be set up so that new posts must be checked by moderators before the posts are published.
A forum can be restricted to a select group of users. Forum access rights can be granted to and removed from individuals by administrators.
A forum can be restricted to registered users only so that unregistered or anonymous users cannot access the forum.
A forum can be made to accept anonymous posts. Anonymous posts are posts made by users who are not signed in and are marked by the pseudonym "Anon.".
Topics can be automatically locked after a specified number of days so that users can't go back to old topics, weeks or months later, and rewrite them, which would be confusing to readers. The number of days is set by administrators.
A post can only be edited by the user who orginally made the post. Moderators can only ever censor or delete a post. They can never edit a post. This way, it is clear to everyone that a user cannot change what another user posts.
Discussion Board includes two potential sources of revenue: paid topics and subscriptions. The system integrates seamlessly with PayPal.
"Paid topics" is a system in which users pay to post a topic. For instance, it is possible to set up a forum that only accepts statements and to charge X credits per topic. In effect, this is a classified ads system.
"Subscriptions" is similar to a restricted access forum, except here users pay to access a forum. Each forum can be set up to charge X credits per day.
Topics can be filtered and sorted easily. Users can set their default filter, sort order and number of topics per page.
A topic can be marked as a notice, in which case it is pinned at the top of the list.
Users can choose the order in which replies are displayed - chronologically ascending or descending - and the number of replies per page.
Replies to a standard topic can be read in a linear view or in a threaded view. Post threading is useful for keeping track of who said what to whom in very active topics. Discussion Board employs a recursive threading algorithm and so is able to handle any number of replies in any order and hierarchy.
Users can increase or decrease the font size of a post. Users can also set a default font size.
Users can choose to be notified by email when someone replies to one of their posts.
The system includes a printer-friendly view of topics.
Topics and replies, despite being dynamically generated, do get indexed in search engines such as google.
Each post displays the number of words it has. This allows users to see at a glance how long a post is. It is possible to switch the word count system on and off. If the discussion board is running in a language such as Chinese where a word is not a sequence of characters without a space, it is best to switch the word count system off.
The system records usage and other statistics such as the number of posts, the number of times a topic is read, the latest post, and more. These statistics can help users to determine the nature of activity and interest in the various forums. Statistics can be switched on and off. New discussion boards and communities often do better if statistics are off.
Dates and times can be configured to appear consistently in a particular format by individual users, e.g., dd-MMM-yyyy hh:mm:ss.
All dates are stored in the database in UTC, Universal Time, which is similar to GMT. Users can choose to read dates and times in a particular time zone.
There is a "who's online" system, which shows who is signed-in and where they are. Knowing that others are online at a particular point in time encourages activity. Friends who are signed in appear in bold. When a user signs out, the user is removed from the list immediately. This way the system truly reveals who is online. The who's online system can be switched on and off via the configuration file.
The system keeps track of topics that a user has read. Individual topics and entire forums can be marked as read so that it is possible to see at a glance which topics are new. The algorithm used for is efficient and scalable. For those who are not signed-in, the system will mark topics with posts in the last 24 hours as new.
Users can maintain up to 50 bookmarks of topics. Bookmarks are shortcuts to individual topics within the system.
Users can easily access all of their own posts in one area. This means a user doesn't have to bookmark his or her own topics.
Topics can be rated one to five stars. Average ratings are quantified immediately.
Users can recommend interesting topics to outsiders and other users via email easily.
The system includes several AI recommender agents, or in other words, artificial intelligence. When a user browses a topic, the system will identify and recommend similar topics based on content. This is akin to amazon.com's content recommender agent. When you browse amazon.com, the side of the screen will change depending on what you are looking at. In addition, there is a recommendations area that recommends topics based on bookmarks and ratings. Bookmark based recommendations is akin to social bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us and stumbleupon. That is to say, if you bookmark a topic and another user bookmarks the same topic, chances are the two of you have similar interests and so the bookmarks of the other user might interest you. Rating based recommendations also employ a collaborative recommendation algorithm but with topic ratings. Here, the idea is that if you rate a topic five stars and another user rates the same topic five stars, then other topics rated highly by that user might interest you.
The system offers user profiles instead of avatars and signatures. (This reduces clutter and bandwidth, and prevents spamming via signatures.)
User profile fields are customisable. Administrators can create, edit and remove various profile fields, as often as they want or as often as necessary, within the application itself. This means the system can be made to display any kind of user profile. Administrators can set the label and the field type. Fields can be strings, integers, doubles, boolean (yes/no), dates, and enums (fixed options).
User profiles have one fixed text area. This area is where the user can describe himself or herself, announce what's new, or simply rant meaninglessly.
Users can upload one or more profile pictures. The number of pictures, the file types and the file sizes are all set by administrators. The pictures are presented as an ajaxed slide show.
Users can hide or display their email address, and change it.
Users can send and receive messages to each other (formerly known as private messages or PMs). Users who do not want to receive messages can choose not to. The messenging system stores all messages going back and forth between two users so that who said what and when is clear. The messenging system will automatically remove old conversations, which means users don't have to worry about deleting old messages to keep their inboxes within a specific quota. Moreover, the messenging area is ajaxed so in effect it works like a chat application with new replies appearing automatically without the user's browser having to refresh. The system also notifies users when a new message arrives. This is helpful when a user is online and in another part of the system.
Users can choose to receive messages from everyone, from friends only, or from administrators only.
Administrators can send an email message to all registered users. Users who do not want to receive emails from administrators can opt out of the mailing list. The application's mass mailing system includes a message queue so that the SMTP server won't have to try to send out the entire lot in one go, which can cause some SMTP servers to fail.
Administrators can specify a list of unreachable or bad emails so that every user with an email found to be and marked as unreachable won't be able to use the system's emailing capabilities. This protects the system from having to send out emails to invalid addresses.
Users can specify "friend links". Each "friend link" connects one user profile to another. A user can either request another user to link, or invite an unregistered user to join and link. Before a two-way link can be established, both users must agree to the link. Friend links facilitate user profile surfing and social networking, which is commonplace at sites such as myspace.com and facebook.com. Both users in a friend link can choose to remove the link at any time.
The system will dynamically find users with similar profiles, if there is one or more enum profile fields. This means if you are browsing the profile page of one user, aside from friend links, there will be links to other users with "similar" profiles or interests. This encourages social networking and profile surfing.
Each user profile has a guestbook. Users who are signed-in can post guestbook entries, which are publicly viewable comments. Users who own the guestbook can remove entries, if necessary.
The system presents lists of the most active users by posts and hours spent online, the users with the most friend links, the newest users, the users most recently online, the users with the most popular profiles, and the users with the recently updated profiles. Research says that what interests advertisers and venture capitalists isn't the number of visits or hits anymore. Rather, the better metric is hours spent online. Discussion Board tracks this automatically.
The system protects against accidental, duplicate entries by disabling various buttons immediately after they are pressed.
The text editor is robust and can handle all kinds of text including software code. It is also the same across all of the current generation browsers.
The system includes a text spell checker (English only). The spell checker was built in house. It does not depend on third party software. There is no need to have other software installed on your server, or be concerned with third party licensing issues.
Posts can be written in various fonts and colours. The style will apply to the entire post. Users can set their the default font and colour. The system can be made to deny fonts and colours. The fonts and colours that users can choose from are set up by administrators through the config file.
Hyperlinks and mailto's in posts are detected automatically and rendered properly to readers. Hyperlinks in posts are rendered with the rel="nofollow" attribute, an initiative from Google, Yahoo and MSN to discourage content spam.
The system has the capacity to automatically censor undesirable words. A list of censored words can be set up within the administrative area. Thereafter, censored words appearing in topics or replies are masked by asterisks.
Topic headers in full caps can be blocked automatically. Many people find text in full caps difficult to ready quickly, so being able to block these sorts of posts improves the usability of the system.
Long sequences of characters without spaces in posts are handled appropriately by the system. If left as they are, these sorts of posts can stretch and distort the user interface.
Client side script tags are prevented. This removes the opportunity of malicious "cross scripting attacks" that can disrupt or deny an online forum.
The system protects against SQL injection attacks.
The system protects against cross postback or viewstate attacks.
Users can report breaches of the terms of use, spam and misplaced posts. Reported posts are gathered and displayed to moderators who must either approve, censor, delete or move the post. Once a post is approved, it cannot again be reported unless it is subsequently edited.
The system can be made to automatically identify spam. Administrators can declare a set of spam words. If found a new post is found to contain a spam word, it is automatically marked as spam and brought to the attention of moderators.
The system includes an anti-flooding algorithm, that can be switched on or off by administrators. Duplicate posts and posts with largely duplicate content made within a certain period and by the same user are blocked. This prevents spammers and malicious users from trashing your discussion board.
The system supports form-based authentication and Windows authentication. Windows authentication is ideal for discussion boards that need to operate within a corporate intranet.
If using forms authentication, users can sign into the system automatically by means of cookie technology.
If using forms authentication, there is a password recovery system in case users forget their passwords.
For security, user passwords are stored in the database as encrypted strings.
The system can be integrated into an existing asp.net application and use the application's user management system. Discussion Board ships with an extra DLL that makes it possible to register users, sign-in users and sign-out users programmatically.
User registration is simple and seamless, and adopts a "challenge-response" approach to email validation.
The system can be set up to require all usernames to comply with a certain format. eg, Letters and numbers only vs letters and spaces only vs every character.
Administrators can suspend individual users, restrict the access of a user to certain parts of the system (eg, deny messages or file uploads), restrict a user to read only, and/or require all posts made by a specific user to be screened (even when the forums in question are not screened). All of this gives more power to administrators to keep spammers and other troublemakers at bay.
Suspending a user through the system will immediately boot the user out (ie, end the user's session) and thus prevent the user from being online or signing in thereafter. This means an administrator doesn't have to suspend a user and then reupload a modified web.config file so that all session states are cleared and the troublemaker is forcibly signed out. Booting a user out is simply a matter of suspending the user through the admin area.
The terms of use text is contained in a .txt file so it can easily be changed to suit any site's needs.
It is possible to block user registrations with emails from a certain domain.
It is possible to block access by IP addresses, and to grant exemptions to individual users.
The system will log all users who attempt to access the site but are blocked as a result of the list of blocked IPs. The log is useful for monitoring the effect of a blocked IP policy.
Administrators can vet new users, granting or denying them access. User vetting is optional. If switched off, a user who registers will immediately be able to post on the board.
Administrators can delete a user, thus removing the user from the system entirely. When a user is deleted, the system will automatically reverse all poll and topic rating votes that the user has made so that it is as if the user never voted in the first place, and change all posts made by the user to "Anon.".
The system includes an updatable user guide system that can be helpful to newcomers. The user guide includes a search engine. The help file is an XML file, so it is possible to add, modify and remove text.
The user interface is friendly and intuitive. The system notifies users of new PMs, friend link requests, guestbook entries, and the like.
There is a HTML plugin system. HTML code can easily be added to parts of the system without having to change any of the system's main files.
The look-and-feel of the user interface can easily be changed because all styling is contained within the system's CSS file. The interface's tabs can be switched off so that a hyperlinked menu appears instead.
The system has been tested with Internet Explorer 7, FireFox 2 and Opera 9
An application identifier (DB_) is used to mark files, application settings, and session objects. The application is compiled as updateable. In consequence, the system can easily integrate into an existing ASP.NET website.
The software is packaged in a self extracting zipped file and delivered digitally via www.activedataonline.com.au upon purchase.

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Languages

English and other languages supported by Unicode. The GUI is localised so it can be presented in languages other than English, and the database can accept text in any language supported by Unicode.

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Product support

Registered customers may seek support via the online forum, free of charge.

If you discover any bugs or the like with the product, please report it immediately so that the product can be fixed as soon as possible and an upgrade can be provided to you, free of charge.

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System requirements

Internet or intranet domain
Internet Information Server with Microsoft .net framework version 3.5 installed
Microsoft SQL Server 2000 or 2005, Oracle 10g Release 10.2, MySQL 5.0, PostgreSQL 8.2, or Microsoft Access (.MDB file provided)
SMTP email server
Read/Write access to a part of the server file system in addition to asp.net's App_Data folder
Standard Web browsers such as Internet Explorer, Opera, or FireFox

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Trust level setting

If the application is going to be hosted within a shared environment, it is important to check that the host supports the asp.net trust level needed by the application.

The application can run at a medium trust level if using SQL Server; otherwise the trust level must full, high or medium but customised to include OleDbPermission, OdbcPermission and/or OraclePermission, depending on the database connection type. If using Access and OleDb, then OleDbPermission is necessary. If using Oracle 10g and OracleClient, then OraclePermission is necessary. If using Access, Oracle, MySQL or PostgreSQL and ODBC, then OdbcPermission is necessary.

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Pricing and licensing

End User Licence, subject to the terms of the Licence Agreement

300 Australian dollars

Notes:

1. Australian registered companies and persons residing in Australia must pay a 10% GST in accordance with Australian tax laws. The price with GST is 330 AUD.

2. If you are an existing customer, and you have the same major version number as the current release, you can receive the current version free of charge. Contact Active Data Online via the messenging system of the customer support discussion board to receive your free upgrade. If you are an existing customer, and you have a different major version number from the current release, you can upgrade to the current version for 50% off the list price. In this case, you have to submit an order but with the price halved. Please send a message regarding the upgrade order before mailing it.

3. A hosted solution is available.

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Order

Before submitting an order, please read the system requirements and the licence carefully.

Each licence is for one server. You must specify a website domain, which can be a full domain (eg, yourdomain.com) or a subdomain (eg, forums.yourdomain.com), and optionally the IP address of the server. Your licence will not work at another website.

Discussion Board can be set up to run in the application root space of your website or in a subfolder of the application root space of your website. If you would like to run Discussion Board in a subfolder, you must specify the domain (or subdomain, if it is a subdomain) and path to the subfolder (eg, yourdomain.com/forums/). Your licence will not work in another subfolder or elsewhere. If you would like to run Discussion Board in the application root, you only have to specify the domain or subdomain.

If you buy a licence for "yourdomain.com/forums/1" and the IP address "123.456.789.0", then your licence will only work in the following locations:
http://www.yourdomain.com/forums/1/DB_Index.aspx
http://yourdomain.com/forums/1/DB_Index.aspx
http://123.456.789.0/forums/1/DB_Index.aspx
http://localhost/forums/1/DB_Index.aspx

Both http and https will work.

To order, fill out an order form (print it out via WordPad or IE7), one form per item, sign the form, and send the form together with payment to

Active Data Online Pty Ltd
P.O. Box 399
Sebastopol
Victoria 3356
Australia

Payment must be by bank cheque denominated in Australian dollars, made payable to "Active Data Online Pty Ltd ABN 83 095 152 453". (Important: personal cheques, money orders, cash and other forms of payments won't be accepted.)

Please ensure that your domain, path and (optional) IP are written correctly on the order form.

A sale is final and non-refundable.

If you are ordering from outside Australia, postage will normally take a fortnight or thereabouts. Please send a message via the the messenging system of the customer support discussion board about the order soon after sending it so that when it arrives it can be processed as quickly as possible.

Once everything clears, an email containing your download information and password will be sent to you, and you can proceed to download the product(s) via www.activedataonline.com.au. The package will include a tax invoice.

If your order is not approved, your cheque will be discarded and you will be notified by email. In this case, you should probably also cancel the cheque at your bank.

If you have any questions or concerns, please use the messenging system.

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Roadmap

No plans in the near future. Suggestions are welcome.

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