Guild Scheduled Event Improvements

[Mitmocc]

Guild Scheduled Events were a good idea. Unfortunately Discord has not went far enough with them, so very few servers are using them atm. I have a few suggestions after implementing them to my bot and reading user feedback in the past few weeks:

1. Events that take place in a voice or stage channel DO NOT start automatically atm, despite the last screen of creation stating it. If this is intended, please re-think that. Why would it not start automatically ?

2. You can hide events from specific users/roles if the event takes place in a voice or stage channel by hiding the voice or stage channel from the user/role. Make this possible for text channels too, I don't understand why you would go for such an inconsistency. In fact, make Text channels an option just like voice or stage channels. Currently you have to use external and just mention the text channel there. Meetings can be held via text as well, so I don't get excluding text channels like that. Especially since it prevents you from hiding events now unless you attach a voice or stage channel.

3. Move away from only having the "Interested" button. I mean, this isn't facebook. Sure there are events where you don't care for commitment. But the majority will want some kind of commitment or definitive answer to their events. Use "Accepted", "Declined"
   and "Maybe". Or make the style of that event optional in that regard. By being so restrictive and imprecise you are just driving users away from using this feature.

4. Allow users and bots to add and remove users from the attendance list, provided they have the "Manage Events" permission.

5. Allow masking links in the description. Increase the description character limit, 1000 is unnecessarily low.

6. Allow attaching images via URL to the event instead of only allowing it via upload.

7. Give users a tab in their home area to view all events they are signed up for.

[lsdimagine]

cc @hemu

[hemu]

These are great suggestions, thanks for thinking these through and sharing. Some of our initial plans included some of these, e.g. (3) and a few others on this list we did consider but decided against for the first offering of events. Shared these suggestions with the team 👍 we'll have a discussion about where these can fit on our list of improvements we want to make

[hemu]

Like you mentioned in (7) we did have some ideas early around showing users a way to see all the events they signed up for in one place, maybe even a calendar-ish view. For (4) we had concerns around allowing users or bots to add other users to an event, but could revisit allowing removing users.

[Mitmocc]

Initially I understood the reasoning for not allowing it. Obviously there could be unwanted notifications resulting from it. But time and feedback has shown me that making actual use of guild scheduled events will never be widespread without a bot doing work in the background or using its own embed to display event data. Not being able to sync up the bot events users list with the guild scheduled event "interested" list is a shame, because it will never be fully seamless that way. Here is how it currently looks:

The interested button is redundant, it would be a nice touch to be able to sync it up. Especially if (7) ever makes it into discord. Now obviously you are gonna think, why not just not have an embed and only use guild scheduled events? There is not enough space, no formatting options and no other way to reply to "interested" clicks other than sending a DM. If the description was an embed and the "interested" button was like an interaction that you could reply to with a modal and modals would allow for more components than just text fields, then sure. But that is an utopian ask.

So we'll be stuck with bots doing the heavy lifting for scheduling needs in separate embeds for probably ever. And the guild scheduled events will just be used as a nicer overview of a servers events and give more visibility when an event starts. Which is fine, but being able to keep it fully synced would still be super cool.

I understand the concerns, I just wish there was a way to make it safe via a permission or an intent or something similar. But I also understand that it's probably too small of a thing to put in that work.

Thanks for replying!