MROC Platform
The market research online community platform behind onlivepanel.com — built for OnLive Research, run for Opinion AS, retired on schedule after 16 years in production.
Custom research community platform. Off-the-shelf tools didn't exist.
OnLive Research — the insight agency that later merged into Opinion AS — needed a custom research panel platform that could evolve with its business. Off-the-shelf tools couldn't handle the specific workflows, community management features, and integration requirements of a professional market research operation.
The platform needed to serve both the internal team managing research communities and the panel members participating in them — with different interfaces, permissions, and capabilities for each.
Built from scratch. Shipped 2010. Ran until 2026.
A market research online community platform launched in 2010 after 7 months of development. The platform managed research panel recruitment, community participation, survey distribution, moderated discussions, real-time chat, rewards, and reporting — all within a single integrated system.
After the initial launch, the platform was continuously improved and refactored over 8 years of active development. A real-time messaging layer, gamification, a single-page application, and native mobile apps were added; workflows were revised; and the architecture was evolved to handle new requirements without disrupting the running system.
Longevity was the success criterion. The architecture was designed for clarity and maintainability from the start — not for impressive technical complexity. Sixteen years in production without a rewrite is unusual. Most custom platforms get replaced within 3–5 years as the original codebase becomes unmaintainable. This one was never replaced: it was retired in working order in August 2026, at the end of its contract.
A complete research toolkit in one system.
Surveys, diaries & polls
A questionnaire engine with 20 answer types, page branching, screeners, and resumable sessions — from quick polls to multi-week diary studies.
Live discussions
Real-time moderated chat with typing indicators, threaded forums with voting, social feeds, idea ranking, and video vox pops.
Rewards & gamification
Points, badges, ranks, and prize draws driven by a declarative rule engine over the participant action stream, with gift-card redemption.
Segmentation & targeting
A visual query builder over profile attributes, survey answers, and panel data — compiled to SQL for recruitment, targeting, and reporting.
Messaging campaigns
Outbound e-mail, SMS, push, and in-app campaigns to filtered member sets, with per-recipient delivery, open, and bounce tracking.
Multi-tenant white-labelling
Agencies, end clients, and communities in one hierarchy, each community with its own branding, sub-domain support, and a choice of four languages.
Native mobile apps
iOS and Android apps shipped to the app stores in 2014, backed by push notifications from the same platform.
Privacy by design
Self-service data export and account deletion for every member, per-session tracking transparency, and consent-based onboarding.
Sixteen years of communities, conversations, and answers.
Between September 2010 and August 2026 the platform hosted 157 invitation-only research communities for 15 research agencies and 94 end-client brands — most of them Norwegian, with Swedish, Danish, and English communities alongside. Members were still answering surveys and talking to moderators in its final week of service.
Retired in working order — not replaced in frustration.
The final production deployment was in October 2021. That same build was still serving live communities on the day the platform shut down, almost five years later — surveys answered, chats moderated, campaigns sent — with no on-call rota and no emergency fixes.
That stability wasn't luck. It came from conservative technology choices, an architecture that favoured clarity over cleverness, infrastructure managed as code from 2013 onward, and continuous, verified database backups. The boring parts were done properly, so the exciting parts could keep running.
When the platform finally went dark on 31 August 2026, it was a business decision, not a technical failure. Few custom platforms get to retire; most get replaced.
Built in 2010 for OnLive Research, which merged into Opinion AS — one of Norway's leading market research agencies — in 2014. The platform served Opinion's research communities for the rest of its life, through to the contractual end of service on 31 August 2026.