The plugin allows us to announce an event simply as a new Topic. People can add their comments (as a regular discussion), mark they are “Going”, and add the event to their calendar. Also, the Clojure calendar feed supports adding such events automatically.
We have been encountering a few problems so far:
It tries to show the time in your time zone, but is not always correct (e.g., it thinks I am at GMT+2, but currently I am at GMT+3).
The page is not displayerd correctly if you are not logged in (unlike most Clojureverse discussions).
The “Add to Calendar” link does not work for everybody (depending on the Calendar app).
Before we consider whether we should change anything, could you please comment on your experience with this plugin so far?
Are the problems above something you experience?
Is anything else confusing or broken for you?
My only comment is that I am ingesting this feed to make events for the list on the front page of https://clojure.org, so if you change it, let me know. I wish the data in the ical feed had a location in it.
It turns out that if we do not enable RSVP, then the event is visible without login.
This may remove the main obstacle.
If necessary, we can use a dedicated form to mark participation, as @zackteo does in Clojure Asia events.
(Example)
Even if we use this practice to avoid the invisibility problem, we still have the problem of the wrong time zone being displayed (last Saturday, this made a few people show up one hour earlier to the visual-tools meeting).
Please note the Events Plugin might behave a bit differently after the update.
One known difference: in the new version, adding an event to a topic is possible only in specific categories.
This means that when creating a new topic, the Add Event button will appear only after you assign a relevant category to the topic.
At the moment, the only category with events enabled is Meetups and Events).
I wish the data in the ical feed had a location in it.
