Using tags in the forum to announce events?

Proposal:

  • Make a tag group for “events” [DONE]
  • Make tags within that as needed
    • started with “portland” and “online_meeting”
  • Tell users to watch any tag for areas they are interested in
  • Make a subcategory in announcements for “events”
  • Announce local meetups there, conferences Snowdrift folks will be at etc. using appropriate local tags

Benefits over CiviCRM: Anyone can see event listings even if they aren’t located in a region but might just be visiting etc.

Example: Here in Portland this weekend, CLS and OSCON next week (note: free Expo Plus pass with code EXPOFREE), I’d like to announce this to the old Portland email list while also inviting people to the forum and telling them how to continue staying connected in that way after we shut down mailman.

Here’s a post explaining how to do some more complicated things with tags.

Okay, we have a problem:

If we want everyone to watch “Announcements” by default, then putting “Events” within that is going to send emails too often to everyone and push them to stop watching the main Announcements category.

Options:

  • make another subcategory for key announcements limited to the things we really want to ping everyone about ←my vote
  • move #events to a different place
  • make #events default to mute (which would hide it from Latest even) ← I think we do not want this option
  • scrap the category and just have event announcements be posts with the “event” tag within the #clear-the-path:outreach category
  • something else?

What would this be called?

Clearing the Path may make sense to some extent, none of the others seem to fit.

This actually could be a decent option. Basically you have to opt-in to the events/areas you’re interested in receiving announcements about.

I don’t like this, physical events feel like a separate thing from the outreach category.

A relevant question would be how much we want to promote users organizing these local events.

Not sure. Maybe “major announcements” or something like that…

Yeah, I’m actually okay with trying this. I think we can get away with something for now and not have to get this right the first try…

I don’t know, but medium or long-term, it could be great. We’d certainly encourage rather than discourage the idea of people who happen to be at an event doing a Snowdrift BoF even if no team members are around…

What about “Major announcements” as a tag?

2 Appreciations

That sounds like a fine solution. I also like that it resolves forcing people to automatically follow an entire category while still making sure eyes see the big announcements.

1 Appreciation

Doh, tag-watching by default is not yet an option! Only category-watching by default.

Given the challenges of any other approach, I made a new Major subcategory of Announcements and am switching that to be the default watched one.