Author: Changyue Song, Kaibo Liu

IERA was published on Feb 19, 2015. We will continuously track the updates of the platform. Here, we introduce the basic structure, user roles, and other essential issues of this website. The website is composed by two main parts: the main site and the forums.

1. Website Structure

In the main site, we continuously post high-quality articles, concerning all areas in industrial engineering as well as the website itself. In the forums, users can have discussions.

Any user will have two roles with respect to the main site and the forums. Roles of the main site include:

• Administrator: A role with the highest priority
• Editor: Can publish & edit articles in the main site, including others’ articles
• Author: Can publish & edit his own articles in the main site
• Contributor: Can favorite & comment articles, can write their own articles in the main site but cannot directly publish articles

The four roles are sorted according to their priorities. A role with a higher priority will have all the priorities of the roles in the lower level. By default, any registered website user will be a Controbutor. Users may contact admin@iera.name if they are interested in becoming an author or editor.

Roles of the forums include:

• Keymaster: Can create, edit and delete other users’ forums, topics and replies. Can manage Tags, and moderate a forum with the moderation tools. Has access to global forum settings, tools, and importer
• Moderator: Can create and edit forums. Can create, edit and delete other users’ topics and replies. Can manage Tags, and moderate a forum with the moderation tools
• Participant: Can create and edit their own topics and replies

By default, any registered website user will have a role of participant. Users may apply to become a moderator. The following figure summarizes this section.

2. Website Features

Here we list some important features of our website:

• Administrators, editors, and authors can publish articles on the main site. Contributors can submit their articles for review.
• Participants can have discussions in the forum.
• Users may have social networks. They can add friends, see each other’s recent activities, send public/private messages, etc.
• Users can favorite articles & topics, or subscribe topics.
• Latex math equations are supported.
• In the forums, restricted attachments are allowed.

3. Other issues

• To fight against spammers, we have blocked the registration with yahoo emails.
• The logo is changed to emphasize that our website is open to the IE society all over the world.