I like this idea - we also have a category on our forum for events, and this kind of interface would be ideal!
I think if it was enabled per-category, and there was only one date (or date range) associated with a topic, then the potential for abuse is fairly minimal?
I think the title would have to include the year? Or maybe just bump if the day and month are in the future, for the current year the topic was created in only?
“11th Feb” vs
“11/2” vs
“2/11” (cause USA) vs
“11-02” vs
“Feb 11” vs
“Feb 11, 2017” vs
“Feb 2 - Come to the maker fair”
“Come to the maker fair - Feb 2”
It is a solvable problem but there is a lot of magic that would need to be added.
I think the first step here would be to build a plugin for it.
I am not that concerned about abuse cause you could simply ban abusers from posting in the category that allows for this magic behavior if you wanted to.
That’s the only format I would suggest supporting. Unique enough to not be accidental. The year could be optional, we assume current year unless 4-digit year is provided, e.g.
In the UK, and possibly other English speaking countries, these formats are fairly obscure. I would never naturally write a date like that. The day would always go first, like 11th Feb 2018.
I would imagine that across the many languages Discourse is used in, these discrepancies get far harder to cope with.
I agree with @mcwumbly that a date picker would be a good option. I would imagine it is also waaaaaay easier to implement.
If it’s a magic feature, then it needs to support a multitude of formats to allow users to discover it naturally. A date picker is nice and clear, with no confusion (albeit at the expense of some screen real-estate).
That’s an excellent idea - I wonder if a Discourse instance could be linked to Google Calendar, and then we can benefit from their UI, and the ability for members to subscribe to this calendar.
As we’re talking about Google Calendar now, I figured I would try all of Sam’s ideas above using Google Calendar’s quick add feature. Any change Google has open sourced this?
Worked (added an event on February 11, 2018):
“11th Feb”
“2/11”
“Feb 11”
“Feb 11, 2017”
“Feb 2 - Come to the maker fair”
“Come to the maker fair - Feb 2”
International issue (added an event on Novermber 2, 2017):
“11/2”
What about other languages? The “most used format” might be different.
For instance, nobody ever writes a 3-letter month notation in Russian / Ukrainian. We usually write “6 апреля” (6th of April), or 06.04 (date comes always first).
What? That definitely should not schedule for the following year, especially seeing as this test was done on May 08 2017 - topics talking about recent past events are common.
In general though, this does seem like a good idea, and there’s now support in place with Topic Timers.