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

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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

[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".