We really do need a new Topic to be created for each event, rather than a single event Topic controlling a whole bunch of events visible in the calendar.
At the moment the only feasible workaround is to manually make a bunch of new Topics. This of course fills up the Latest feed in a most annoying fashion (which needs mitigation somehow), as well as requiring that you are careful not to over-notify. I guess that highlights some of the challenges in bringing this feature to life.
Cute idea, but I don’t think it will quite go far enough - each event in a series really needs its own RSVP, supplementary information, and discussion.
the RSVP would be replaced by the poll, so all the events in the topic would be standalone (primary and styled secondaries) . The events would all be about the same thing, the complexity: locking-in a time from various times.
Not really a series nor something that can be achieved in outlook.
It’s the special sauce that turns an institution, like the university i’m in, away from defensively-false outlook series and toward Discourse.
Returning to this after using the revamped plugin over the last few months; it works pretty nicely now that we’ve got more recurrence options - especially the X’th day of the month, and the ability to RSVP to either the event or the series.
However, a key problem remains: archiving the last event’s content.
The use case is a recurrent event which has quite a few posts / discussion with it. This may include attached files and images. The most obvious example is a regular work meeting.
At the moment, this resulting mess needs to be sorted manually one way or another, as what recurrence does is simply change the date of the event and clear the RSVP. The manual options are:
Turn off recurrence before / during the Event and post a new Event for next month
Move the relevant posts to a dedicated archive post
Auto-delete the posts on the event post (although the timing of this is awkard)
Forget the whole recurrence thing for these types of events and just do it all manually
None of these are great unfortunately.
What I’d like to see instead
I’d like recurrence to preserve the current Event topic intact, but once it is completed the plugin would create a new Topic for the next Event.
This would keep the lovely flow, and would automatically ensure that an appropriate archive of the past event is retained - as well as giving a ‘clean’ Topic for the new event.
The price to pay (apart from increased complexity) would be that the active event would have a new URL. I could see this potentially being an issue in some cases.
Hi, this implies that you will need to wait for the current event of the recurring event serie to be closed before you can subscribe to the next event?
Most event plugins I’ve worked on Joomla will create the serie of events directly like your idea here would create individual topics/url per events which I think is the right model.
Giving the option to disallow subscription before x days of the recurring events would be also practical.
For the archiving part aren’t events mostly residing in their own subcategory or tag-gable enough to keep them together and have an automated action on them?
Yeah, but that is no different to the current situation where you can RSVP to either the current event or the whole series.
You mean an action to clone the event and move the replies, or something similar? Perhaps Workflows could do this; I have been meaning to look into that.
RSVP to the whole serie is less used in my experience with events than being able to subscribe to a precise event later in the serie; both options are important though.
Yes, however I don’t see on my installation any workflow that does that.
It’s maybe in itself another feature request and interesting beyond the scope of events topic and I could/should create another topic for this.
We’d need an automatic archiving action triggered on certain conditions; here it would be “event date or end date if present” is in the past or topic is closed since x days, with maybe a chooseable delay before the action occurs so that event topic can still remain visible for people to comment after the event for a few days.
An Event ended trigger for Workflows has now been merged:
Also, Workflows already has a Topic action which can Get an existing topic and Create a new one, and there is a Wait node. So quite a lot of the proposed rollover may already be composable as a workflow rather than requiring a dedicated event-specific archiving feature.
Something along the lines of:
Event ended → Wait → Topic / Get → Topic / Create
could potentially create a successor topic using the old topic’s title/body/category data, while leaving the completed topic intact as the archive.
What would still need checking is exactly which parts of the old topic should be copied automatically - for example tags, uploads, event recurrence state, and whether replies should be moved or simply left behind.
I also have an open PR introducing an Event action to Workflows:
The base PR adds Close event and Open event, and I have a stacked follow-up adding Set attendance:
The action is structured so further event-specific operations could be added as separate follow-ups where they make sense.
Nice efforts thanks, the close conditions can be helpful but may not be entirely applicable to the original situation.
An event category can grow big above all with recurring events and it would make sens to provide a way to auto archive/move any topic event closed since x days to a past topic category or archive them.
But this archiving question depends on the decision to have recurring events become individual topic linked to the main event topic.
I’ve opened a PR implementing this as an opt-in recurring Event mode:
It adds a discourse_post_event_recurring_topic_mode site setting with two choices:
reuse_topic — the existing behaviour and the default
create_next_topic — preserve the completed occurrence Topic and create a new Topic for the next occurrence
With create_next_topic, when an occurrence ends the completed Topic is retained with its Event pinned to that completed occurrence and recurrence removed. A successor Topic is then created for the next recurrence, preserving the original title/body, category, tags and author, while advancing the Event dates.
The automated tests also cover RSVP rollover semantics: recurring going attendance is carried into the successor, while one-off attendance remains with the completed occurrence.
The rollover is also transactional, so if creating the successor fails the occurrence remains pending and can be retried rather than being left half-completed.
This specifically implements the “create the next Topic when the current occurrence ends” model. It doesn’t yet generate individual Topics for all future occurrences in advance, which is the alternative model @opcourdis mentioned above.
The existing behaviour remains the default, so this is opt-in for sites which want the completed Event Topic to act as the archive.
Thank you, this model works great already for organizers who could now confidently know they won’t have to recreate an event each time and also gives the safety that people people won’t subscribe in advance because organizers can always cancel an event for certain reasons.
The create in advance model I suggested also works for many cases and would complement your event successor model.
1 ° Do people who subscribe to the new event still get to know that the topic/event is part of recurring event serie like the original event/topic is?
2° Is your auto invite original guest to the event an opt out/in option? I say this because a future event is not necessarily an event that you want to always promote to the guests since you already promoted the event and its serie once to them via the first event.
Yes, in the sense that the successor Event keeps the recurrence configuration. For example, in the GUI smoke test the original occurrence showed Every Thursday, and after rollover the successor Topic also showed Every Thursday with the date advanced to the following week.
What this PR doesn’t add is a separate cross-Topic series relationship linking the completed Topic and its successor. The completed Topic becomes the one-off archived occurrence, while the successor carries the recurrence forward. An explicit series/parent relationship between those Topics could be a separate enhancement if that proves useful.
It doesn’t automatically carry every guest/attendee into the new Event.
The successor only inherits people who were going with the recurring/series RSVP enabled. Someone who RSVP’d going only to the individual occurrence remains on the completed Topic and isn’t added to the successor.
So at present the existing choice to RSVP to the series effectively acts as the opt-in for being carried into future successor Events, rather than there being another site setting controlling it.
Great if recurrence is mentioned that’s enough and the category or subcategory also conveys that the event is part of a serie; just thinking about it makes me realize how big a subcategory for events can grow when recurring events are present, hence the conversation about the auto archive workflow/automation earlier in this topic.