Fix the Calendar, Don't Engage in Social Engineering

Recently, there has been a large degree of consternation regarding the event and calendar system. In response, LL has instituted some very restrictive new posting policies.

While I agree the system needed fine tuning, I think it should have been done primarily at the application level, not at the policy level.

--If a major complaint was too many events to announce/hear, then why not stop announcing them, altogether? As vague as they've become, they are really pointless.

--If people don't like wading through long lists of events, why not add filtering tools? Take the Google approach! Let the tools streamline the content, not vice versa.

--If overlapping events on a sim are causing major lag, why not have the Web application do a check for overlapping events before accepting the post? If overlapping, return an error that suggests alternate time slots.

While other forums are more appropriate venues for the philosophical issues related to this topic, I think it is worth mentioning that SL is not supposed to be about social engineering or moral entrepreneuership. With that:

--Implement automated survey/voting stations where citizens can weigh in on these kinds of issues. These forums don't represent the broader populace, and this would at least give citizens a sense of being involved in the decision making process.

Great suggestions, unfortunately, they require work from LL who, it seems prefers to put unenforced "rules of conduct" out there rather than write code.

Which I actually perceive as a net good, sad to say.

i don't care what they do with the event calendar. i just want them to stop making the event announcements or, at least, make seeing them optional.

i understand that making them optional requires some coding to separate them from serious announcements about downtimes and such. but that should've been done long ago.

I think better tools would be nice indeed. I am pretty sure we will get this feature eventually. The announcements, "Hey Folks, five events coming up, look at the event schedule", are pretty pointless. I would like to opt out of that.

But, I think event guidelines are necessary and should be enforced. If at some point the event schedule is structured to just allow daily announcements, then allow those at that time.

There should always be a distinction between events and announcements.

- Get rid of the event announcements
- Bring back the event notecards on request/demand
- Have separate PG/M notecards, and have each one categorized by event type, as well as time slot.
- Enforce the 24-hour advance notice rule
- Have each telehub serve as an event notecard kiosk, instead of having the liaison of the moment getting bombarded with requests.
- Leave the events section of the Find feature alone.

I endorse these suggestions, Grim. Great ideas.

I agree there need to be guidelines, Loki, just not as a knee-jerk, stop-gap measure. The new event rules aren't being uniformly enforced, anyway, and to expect that the Lindens will actually have the bandwidth to closely monitor them is just wishful thinking. I have other concerns about "censorship" ramifications, but this is not the thread within which to delve into them.

I say, let the application(s) enforce the business rules wherever possible. Let's just acknowledge that the Lindens are far too busy to fairly monitor these types of issues.

The "new" standards are really the old standards. When we got flooded with new residents, the definition of what an event was got blurred. Its not really anyones fault, it just happened. Because we have been talking about it, the Lindens are trying to handle it. But, your right, its a lot of manual work to go through everything and try to decide what stays and goes.

An automated system is the way to go. Let everyone post all the events and announcements they want and let the end user decide how to filter it.

I don't see the new rules as being knee jerk. They seem to point back the origins of event giving. It is true that these rules are definitely not being uniformly enforced tho.

IMHO - if the event complies with Linden event standards, it should be announced. If not - no post or announcement. I agree that the current announcements are way to vague.

I think we need a new pop up window, smaller, less intrusive, and one that just lists the events including the sim names, for that hour. Once on the hour is fine. Maybe another calendar for non-compliant events or some sort of information dispersing method about them.

fen-

Yeah, if there was some way to better integrate the events list and the events popup... and if you could just opt-out of the entire thing. Does ANYONE care about the announcements? Are they useful in ANY WAY to anyone at all anymore?

Rarely and not really, respectively

i remember finding them useful my first month or so. perhaps event announcements could world for avs under forty-five days old. if we're logged in with an av that's older than that, the client won't show them.

of course the new " it's <insert time>, there are a few events happening this hour. look at the list or IM me" format is pretty useless even for newbies i suppose.