A web portal with usersubmitted content : Creating a web portal and minimizing its need for administrative work

Abstract: A web portal that publicly displays user-submitted content requires administration in order to ensure undesired content, that is potentially malicious, is excluded. Other administrative aspects that come with a web portal with user-submitted content include user-support and service maintenance. This project was formed in part to develop a new version of an existing web portal for advertising degree projects. The goal of the project is to develop an improved version of the old web portal and ensure that the new version requires as little manual administration work as possible. As how to minimize administration for this type of service was deemed unknown, this thesis takes an inductive approach to exploring how to minimize administration for a web portal with user-submitted content. This thesis results in the presentation of a web portal with new functionality and modified in aspects that the product owner wanted improved. The visual layout is presented along with information on what parts were reused from the old version of the web portal. Design choices that were made with a focus on minimizing administration and design choices in general that were deemed important are presented and motivated. Finally, the thesis concludes that possible areas where administrative work could be reduced depends heavily on the requirements set on the web portal and that the methods used in this thesis were successful in identifying administrative work aspects that can be reduced or eliminated on the web portal developed in this project. It is also concluded that sufficiently advanced automated systems could be useful in reducing the administrative work needed by any type of web portal with user-submitted content.