Inspiration
I called this project Friendly Expats. I initially wanted to create an app with PhoneGap, but I realised that it does not support PHP, so I developed my project as a website This website is for people who are at least 18 and who need help from people from their country abroad. The target users are university students. For example, if I am from Russia and I travel to Taiwan, I do not know anyone there, so I can use the website to find people from Russia who can help me do anything in Taiwan such as get to the city for a lower price or see the city, again, for free or for a small fee. I plan to set the fee limit to $50 or create a forum for negotiating prices. The idea behind the project is that there are always people to help you out but the problem is that you do not know whom to contact or to trust. Another problem people face is language gap, so if they can find a person from their own country, they will be more comfortable talking to that person and asking for help. Even though services are not supposed to be costly, there still should be a source of motivation for helpers. I decided that the website may organise regular but unexpected giveaways to people who helped the most. The people who were helped can be asked by the helper to submit feedback about them, and the number of feedback forms will reflect the number of times a helper helped out.
What it does
I did not implement this functionality, but I would like the website to create reputation scores that depend on multiple criteria such as forum activity, ratings from other users, etc. I also wanted to implement a natural-language processing functionality that would crawl forums and identify people who use inappropriate language to then lower their reputation scores. This way, people will know whom to trust. I didn't implement a messaging functionality, but giving away phone numbers might not be the best idea, so I want to give people a way to contact each other through the website before they meet. The functionalities I implemented are not complete because I did not have enough time. I implemented sending requests to people, i.e. asking a person for help. They can send a message and attach a file, which is optional. Another functionality I implemented is search, where people's descriptions are shown along with their current location and places they have been to. Disclaimer: there might be bugs because I did not do much testing. Some functionalities may not work, e.g. downloading files (uploading files works though) Login Credentials if you need them: username: yerke5 password: HelloWorld007)
How I built it
I built it like a website with Bootstrap and jQuery, but it is supposed to be an app
Challenges I ran into
I couldn't convert my code to an Android app using PhoneGap because it doesn't support PHP
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
What I learned
It's been a long time since I learned web development, so I forgot a decent amount of stuff. I should revise regularly
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