Improvements for posts related to events

Thanks for the kind words! I’m always trying to convey the most useful information first for folks with busy inboxes. I like the idea of just archiving/striking through the dates to repost each month. Great tip!

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Very good points. We can expect many activities within the scope of the MS Forum that happen at a time, date, and time zone.

Discourse already offers basic functionality out of the box. When writing a post, users can click the calendar :spiral_calendar: icon to insert a date:

image

The result looks like this (you can hover over the data with your mouse to see more information):

Wikimedia Summit: 2022-09-08T22:00:00Z2022-09-10T22:00:00Z

August 27, Asia-Pacific Friendly time : 08:00–09:00 UTC (15:00–16:00 Bangkok, Jakarta / 16:00–17:00 Singapore / 13:30–14:30 New Delhi / 18:00-19:00 Melbourne / 20:00-21:00 Auckland)

This date information above (source) could be presented like this in the Forum:

2022-08-27T09:00:00Z2022-08-27T10:00:00Z

Logged-in users see the information in their timezone and language format.

The advanced mode offers other types of formatting i.e., the same dates above:

Saturday, August 27, 2022 9:00 AMSaturday, August 27, 2022 10:00 AM

This is possible already now. If there is interest in more, we could consider trying the Discourse Event plugin, which brings some of the features suggested by @Zblace.

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Good to know that can advance. I expect many smaller events being
announced after Wikimania and Wikimedia Summit are done and that can
get too busy quickly.

It would be useful to agree on a systematic way to announce events, yes.

As a little step, I have started editing posts to make people aware of this feature. See

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Thank you that will be very helpful !

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@Zblace What if we morph this request into a proposal to enable the official plugin Discourse Event? It’s just a couple of admin clicks away. The features of this plugin would be useful for Using this forum in the context of events.

A couple of illustrative screenshots:


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I think that would be a great idea. it’s a great way to increase our functionality here, and it really does benefit the community. keep those great ideas coming, @Qgil-WMF !

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Sorry but I totally missed this post…

IMHO follow the bold Wiki principle and just enable it even if just for few hours or days as experiment. Maybe a topic with FORUM Maintenance and Service Announcements should be announcing such posts, so people who wanna test (bleeding edge) plugins could follow and join in formal tech. experiments.

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Isto seria mesmo muito útil! Os encontros são uma parte fundamental da atividade das comunidades Wikimedia. +1 apoio total.

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The Discourse Calendar plugin has been enabled including the Discourse Event functionality. There are many settings available, but I haven’t changed anything

We have a calendar of incoming events. Now we need some calendar data. :slight_smile:

Let’s update the first post as we learn about these new features.

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Can I be temporarily selfish and suggest you add my two topics with CALLs as I am in prep panic to go to Ohrid right now? I promise to go back to them if they need correction and edit in 24h.

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Estou tentado adicionar este evento no calendário, mas ainda não percebi como se faz isso. :smiling_face_with_tear:
Vou tentar aqui mais uma vez. Qualquer coisa, volto aqui para pedir socorro. Obrigada! Essa funcionalidade é incrível.

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Done (see the calendar now):

I’m learning myself as we speak. :slight_smile: Only users who can edit the description can make this change. This means that this is either the author, moderatos/admins… or we can convert the post in a wiki post and then anyone can do it. :slight_smile: I’ll do this for this post.

Then you need to edit the post, place the cursor at the top of the post, click the :gear: icon, and click “Create event”. A form will appear, fill it, and save changes. This should work.

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Nice! See the “in 6 days” box in the timeline:

image

Also, I have set a reminder for both topics 60 minutes before the event. I’m not sure what this will do. Maybe notify those who have expressed interest? Maybe the topic is bumped to the top of the timeline?

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If this is working well then Wikimedians who use FB for events (but otherwise hate it) can start moving in massively… This could really be the killer feature!

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Turns out you can set a calendar for a specific category. See for instance CEE Meeting - Movement Strategy Forum.

It is also possible to send bulk invites for a specific event. I guess the topic author and moderators/admins can do this. At the top right corner of the post, there are three dots. When clicking them, a dialog appears:

Clicking “Bulk invite” offers various ways to invite Forum users:

image

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Thanks Quim, confirming that I as a non-author/moderator could not invite people to the event.

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Interesting. We might need an overview of all this.

In case you are curious, I am testing more functionality here: Testing custom fields in events and more

@Zblace, yes, I commit to write an overview. Other volunteers welcome! The first post is wiki editable. :wink:

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It seems that combining event box and wiki / shared edits on the same post is technically fragile. It is better to separate them. See Discourse Event time tags disappear sometimes + event box trouble - bug - Discourse Meta and the trouble I had with [CEE Meeting] Introduction to CEE Hub right now (you can check the version history of the first post).

Separating event box from shared edits is a good idea regardless, because with multiple people editing in real-time, chances are that someone will accidentally mess with the event box text format.

When creating an event, we can have the first post with the event box posted by the author, and then a separate post for meeting notes when the organizers require it.