https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/9j4qyh/making_it_easier_to_host_events/
created by 0perspective on 26/09/2018 at 17:44 UTC*
244 upvotes, 36 top-level comments (showing 25)
Hi Mods,
We’ve been working on a few things to make it easier for you to host events for your communities. Over the last week, we’ve invited a few mod teams (see comments for the list) to start trying them out as a beta, so we wanted to let the rest of you know what’s up as well.
Many people come to Reddit during events—whether it's an AMA, a TV show premiere, a sports finale, or another newsworthy development[1]. The problem is that it’s hard for users to find these events (both when they’re happening and when the next one is occurring) and even harder for mods to host and manage them using our existing tools.
1: https://redditblog.com/2018/07/12/thanosdidnothingwrong/
Solutions like AutoModerator scheduler aren’t super accessible or easy to use for mods who aren't already AutoMod wizards, and other hacks communities have used to manage events have shown us where our tools could be improved.
We're building a suite of mod-only features to solve these problems:
We’ve broken event metadata, post scheduling, and post collections into separate features because we believe they have broader utility than the Events-specific use case and want to give mods flexibility as you test these out. Our goal for each of these is to reduce the amount of time/effort you put into hosting an event on Reddit and to make it easier for more mods to help host. As we evaluate these features, we may decide to invest more in some and less in others. Your feedback will help us prioritize this and we’ll keep you posted along the way.
2: https://new.reddit.com/user/0perspective/comments/9izc0y/add_event_data/
3: https://new.reddit.com/user/0perspective/comments/9izc6i/collection_mod_flow/
4: https://new.reddit.com/user/0perspective/comments/9izbxn/collection_demo/
We’re testing these features out with a few mod teams and going to launch a series of improvements over the next month or so. For now, you can join our waitlist[5]. We’ll enable more mod teams periodically.
5: https://goo.gl/forms/dgs8p2jD73ZahhIi1
Thanks,
u/0perspective
​
UPDATED 3/14:
We've made a few Event and Collections endpoints available for our beta communities to start trying out and giving us feedback on. You can read more about these APIs here, https://www.reddit.com/dev/api/[6].
6: https://www.reddit.com/dev/api/
Comment by likeafox at 26/09/2018 at 17:53 UTC
33 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Yes we like this. Can you talk about different use cases you have envisioned for the post collections tool? Will the collections have an exposed public API?
Comment by 0perspective at 26/09/2018 at 18:06 UTC
30 upvotes, 3 direct replies
Which mod teams are participating in the beta as of now:
Comment by sarahbotts at 26/09/2018 at 17:53 UTC
14 upvotes, 2 direct replies
This is awesome!
Questions about post submission scheduling. We have rotating weekly threads, is this something we could do with the post submission scheduling without manually doing it every week?
Also, in the video shown there is a text by the submit that says this is editable into the event and only viewable by mods. A) Does this change how normal posts are editable? i.e. why can you not edit it after it is posted, and B) can all mods edit it, or is it just the submitter. C) Where is it visible? Especially for subreddits (I'm speaking specifically to /r/leagueoflegends, but can apply to any active subreddit) that have high turnover, where will the post show? Is there a queue?
Regarding collections, we have a team that normally creates the match threads. Does the collection only apply to mods? And can we add posts from other submitters?
These features would be nice for us during worlds (going on right now) and in general for AMAs.
Comment by MajorParadox at 26/09/2018 at 18:00 UTC
15 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Another question: Will we be able to add old posts to collections? I could see this being a replacement for our wiki archives we manage manually. If we can collect our posts, and there's an easy way to look up, then it'd be automatic. Only problem is the posts already made and any posts made from mods using old reddit.
Comment by [deleted] at 26/09/2018 at 18:00 UTC
13 upvotes, 2 direct replies
Will this feature be available for Old Reddit as well?
Comment by dronpes at 26/09/2018 at 18:31 UTC
11 upvotes, 1 direct replies
This is some exciting stuff!
Initial thoughts through the lens of our hopes and dreams for new Reddit over at /r/TheSilphRoad:
From what I can understand of the Event post metadata right now (which is super cool) it seems like this is best for making a post show up right as an event starts (at the 'start time'). While this is a handy new mod tool, we'd *love* to see it step up one more notch and fill an 'event calendaring' hole we (and many other communities) have.
We often find ourselves answering "when does the event start" the entire day of the event. It'd be great to be able to schedule an 'event' in the future, but make the post visible - not on the sub itself yet, but on the sidebar!
What would be awesome would be a **sidebar widget** that automatically feeds event posts (titles, start times, end times, and hyperlinks to the event post). This would allow us to truly get some excellent usage out of this feature. (The current calendar widget unfortunately doesn't really solve these needs for us at all.)
Also, we have *a lot* of scheduled in-game events/bonuses in Pokemon GO - many which overlap. It'd be amazing to be able to have *multiple* on-going events be easily reference-able by our community. While we *could* swap out stickied posts, sometimes there are 3 events on-going (as some last 2 weeks, etc), or sometimes we would schedule these with a month+ advance notice. A sidebar 'event posts' feed would be the answer to some of these gaps in functionality. It'd be awesome if the new widget system could incorporate this.
I'd be happy to chat about our use case if the product team has questions - and I doubt r/TheSilphRoad is the only community in our shoes!
Comment by V2Blast at 26/09/2018 at 18:10 UTC
11 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Oooh. Yay for scheduled posts. That's the most exciting part of this announcement! (It's much more of a pain to do with old AutoMod's non-built-in functionality.)
Comment by reseph at 26/09/2018 at 17:54 UTC
8 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Neat! This might be useful for MMORPG subreddits. Submitted.
Comment by Trikshot360 at 26/09/2018 at 17:54 UTC
8 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Which communities already have this so I can check it out? Can't wait to have this available to us as it's incredibly useful and long needed!
Comment by reseph at 26/09/2018 at 18:15 UTC
6 upvotes, 1 direct replies
How does this integrate with live threads, or is this replacing live threads?
Comment by 24grant24 at 26/09/2018 at 18:17 UTC
7 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Wow, awesome stuff. Events have always sorta felt unpolished and these will be great ways to really make things seem more professional.
I'm curious if you are considering opening some of these tools up to "approved submitters" or something like that. There are sometimes informal events hosted by individual users. On r/anime for example there are always multiple tournaments, and series rewatch events going on at any given time.
Comment by huadpe at 26/09/2018 at 18:02 UTC
7 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Hey, can I request an invite for this for /r/TheGoodPlace since we have a big event (Season 3 premier) tomorrow night?
Comment by MajorParadox at 26/09/2018 at 17:58 UTC
5 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Very cool! I've been suggesting a concept like this for a while!
Any plans to port some of this data to old reddit? Even if the management of collections and such isn't added, it'd still be very helpful for users to see all this data for the new post types.
Comment by Deimorz at 26/09/2018 at 18:15 UTC
5 upvotes, 2 direct replies
I'm a little confused about the scheduled post and the idea of following it (like the demo shows). If it won't be posted until a specific time, how can users follow it to get the notification? Or are those two aspects of it just basically incompatible?
Comment by DarthMewtwo at 27/09/2018 at 06:08 UTC
6 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Oh man this would have saved so many headaches during /r/ShingekiNoKyojin's 100k subscriber celebration a couple weeks ago...
Comment by OcelotWolf at 26/09/2018 at 17:52 UTC
7 upvotes, 1 direct replies
This looks really helpful, thank you!
Comment by [deleted] at 26/09/2018 at 20:53 UTC
3 upvotes, 0 direct replies
This is pretty sweet
Comment by Coolboypai at 26/09/2018 at 22:51 UTC
3 upvotes, 0 direct replies
On a kind of related note, are there any plans to improve contest mode moving further into the redesign? Adding some of the features mentioned in this post would be very helpful for contests too. Other features such as only considering upvotes like mentioned in this comment[1] would also be great to finally get.
1: https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/30e8xn/moderators_you_can_now_view_contestmode_threads/
Comment by oreng at 26/09/2018 at 23:10 UTC
3 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Post Collections sounds amazing. We run an ungodly amount of megathreads in the assorted conflict subs orbiting /r/syriancivilwar and the ability to portion them into n-hour blocks would be amazing (we've had some that have run, sometimes stickied, for a week or more at a time).
Comment by BuckRowdy at 27/09/2018 at 03:42 UTC
3 upvotes, 0 direct replies
On one of my subs we have a series every year that consists of 10 days of daily posts. In the past I've created an index thread for them, but this sounds like it could take the place of that.
Comment by Georgy_K_Zhukov at 26/09/2018 at 19:12 UTC
2 upvotes, 2 direct replies
Specific Question with regards to the "Post Now to allow to follow" option.
So if I posted an AMA that is actually happening some days later in that way, you note:
In the coming weeks, following the event will send them an app notification when the event starts.
But what happens when it starts? Does that post kick back to the new queue at that time like it was reposted? Or is it still basically just acting as an *announcement* to remind users, but the AMA itself should be posted as a new thread, and a link edited into the original post, if we want it to show up properly in the new queue?
Anyways, the Post Collections sounds like a very welcome addition, as it hopefully makes up for some of the duel functionality that was lost from link flair when searching by css_class was disabled. Looking forward to giving it a try.
Comment by shiruken at 26/09/2018 at 19:56 UTC
2 upvotes, 1 direct replies
This sounds really promising and a feature that /r/science would absolutely have loved to use for our AMAs. Just to clarify, users have to opt into the push notifications for a scheduled event? Or can the mods schedule posts to have notifications sent to all the subreddit subscribers?
Comment by SaltySolomon at 27/09/2018 at 06:56 UTC
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
So, thats the replacement for the really buggy automod sheduller? Thank you very much.
Comment by spacks at 27/09/2018 at 14:03 UTC
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
I'm thinking all of this might be super helpful for geographic subs too, we get tons of requests for megathreads, weekly threads, and ways to collect previous stickies. I'm really excited for this.
Comment by Mr_Gamer_Geek at 26/09/2018 at 17:49 UTC
3 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Hmm, neat.