entries serving as "events" with dates in future

[damerell]

Title:
entries serving as "events" with dates in future

Area:
entries

Summary:
Allow a special class of entry, an "event", with in addition to posting time, a start and finish in the future. Allow a special class of comment saying that one is/is not attending such an event. Facilitate display of upcoming events amongst one's watchlist.

Description:
<user name="liv"> (who has nothing to do with this specific proposal) and I were discussing the depressing popularity of Facebook in spite of its universally acknowledged awfulness.

It seems to me that one of the main drivers behind it is familiar; it's the reason Exchange crops up so widely in a corporate context in spite of its awfulness. Shared calendaring, or similar.

I suggest that something of a similar nature could piggyback on the existing entry infrastructure. An "event" would have additional metadata in the form of start and end times (ideally conveniently organised so that a one-day event can be created without saying "00:00 on Monday 24th July ... 24:00 on Monday 24th July"), and the creation interface would strongly encourage adding a meaningful title to the entry. There's some obvious wishlist stuff for repeating events, but none of that is really necessary. Other than that, they'd be normal entries, with users free to enter what text they pleased, make them public or fiendlocked, etc. (The interface might, wishlist, warn about the creation of public events).

In addition, there'd be a format for metadata in comments which would indicate that a given user was or was not attending an event. Comments consisting purely of such metadata would not be ordinarily displayed. An "event" entry would still permit conventional comments or comments with both text and attendance metadata.

The tricky bit would be in the display; in making this facility as convenient to use as possible. I would suggest, for example, that (optionally) when viewing a watchlist (including a custom view), I would see at the top of the page a list of upcoming events in the next n days posted by users on that list, including their titles and radio buttons to mark my intent to attend them, perhaps mentioning how many others in my Circle are attending. Viewing the entry for an event might present the attendees list in a convenient format assembled from the comment metadata.

Poll #13638 entries serving as "events" with dates in future

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 40

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
5 (12.5%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
1 (2.5%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
13 (32.5%)

(I have no opinion)
21 (52.5%)

(Other: please comment)
0 (0.0%)

Comments

[pocketmouse]

I'm... not sure what the point of this is? Like, a post that automatically locks down after X time, so you could use it for a date-relevant comment fest? And you can see a list of who posted? I need an actual example here.

[denise]

i read it as "post an event entry, allow people to register that they're coming".

[pocketmouse]

That's called having a poll. The only thing I can maybe see different than a regular post is how it would connect to the logged-in homepage, which, to be fair, I never see.

[erik]

One of the features suggested is that having created such an entry, or affirmed your attendance, it would then appear at the top of your watchlist as an "upcoming event" to remind you that it is immanent, etc. (and presumably the entry would then peel off the stack and flow into the watch list in chronological order as the scheduled time aarrived.)

[erik]

I can certainly see the utility of such a feature. I'm not sure emulating Facebook is a-priori a goal to be wished.

[damerell]

The idea is to emulate a feature that makes people use it in spite of its utter awfulness, not to emulate the utter awfulness. :-)

[azurelunatic]

I would like events, and I would like them to appear on the reading list both when posted and when due/close. My brain's wobbling a little over the "entry" bit, on account of some of the original design noodling about opening up the reading list to objects that weren't, strictly speaking, "entries", in a fashion that now seems Tumblr-esque, though I don't know that Tumblr existed at the time it was under discussion.

[azurelunatic]

Some more noodling: what if you could pick "RSVP to $EVENT list" as a security setting? I imagine it being like:

security groups:
handcrafted
- a
- b
- c
opt-in
opt-in: general
- d
- e
- f
opt-in: event
- g
- h
- i


And then you could write entries related to the event, without disturbing the rest of the people reading, if that's what you wanted to do.

Events should have similar restrictions to who's allowed to RSVP as polls have for voting, in case you want to restrict it to only people on your access list.

Events should also themselves be postable to custom security groups.

[cheyinka]

That would be really neat. (All of those ideas.)

[damerell]

Since an event is fundamentally an entry with extra metadata, it's already postable to custom security groups in the original proposal. Likewise, since an RSVP is a comment with extra metadata, RSVPing can be restricted just like comments on any post. :-)

I like the idea of producing a custom group which is people who have RSVPed to a given event. Cunning.

[swaldman]

I think that this is an interesting idea, but I think it is a more major feature than simply "adding some metadata to events".
The time-of-event metadata is not useful unless we're also implementing some sort of calendar or coming-soon display to go with it. The "who's attending" system seems to be the heart of it... perhaps this is a modification of the existing poll system (with some careful thought about privacy) or perhaps it's best considered from scratch?

At first glance, this would only seem to be useful for users for whom most or all of the friends they would want to invite to events are also DW users. I don't know what proportion of our users this might be, but my instinct is that it's quite low - we really don't have the critical mass of Facebook!

This isn't a reason not to do it, but... it makes me think that for the facility to be really useful, and for our users to want to organise their events through DW rather than Facebook, we'd need to allow invitations to be sent to, and responses received from, people who are not DW users. Which is a whole new layer of Stuff, and raises questions about perception of spam to non-users too.

[montuos]

At first glance, this would only seem to be useful for users for whom most or all of the friends they would want to invite to events are also DW users.

...for our users to want to organise their events through DW rather than Facebook, we'd need to allow invitations to be sent to, and responses received from, people who are not DW users. Which is a whole new layer of Stuff, and raises questions about perception of spam to non-users too.

Yes, these are the two major points that have me waffling between "I wouldn't use it because I've used Google Calendar since 2006 but that's no reason to rain on their parade" and "this could be a really bad idea".

[damerell]

I hope it might be useful to users for whom some of the friends they would want to invite to events are DW users (and, of course, if the entry was crossposted, LJ etc users could read it, OpenID users could reply with the metadata...).

Which I think is essentially the answer to your last paragraph. I can't spam my events to non-DW people; but they can read them just as they can read any of my entries if I crosspost them. I can receive a response from someone who could comment normally. As far as possible, it piggybacks on the existing permissions model.

[qem_chibati]

If it has some sort of reminder, I could easily imagine using this for fandom fests.

[cesy]

If we can do it well, I would find DW events really useful for organising meetups with my DW friends, or for posting admin details such as room-sharing about a convention to the other people who are going to that convention.