[quote][b][u]WARNING:[/u][/b] Unfortunately I'm terrible at writing succinctly, so if you want the bare bones of the idea, you might want to skim a bit. Good luck! [b][u]Update:[/u][/b] The Bungie Scheduler was a terrible name, so I'm now calling it the Community Calendar. Don't think I'll update the OP quite yet to reflect the new terminology, I'm a bit lazy at the moment.[/quote] A couple of weeks back during a Community Ride Along, Deej asked everyone in our lobby if there was anything that Bungie could do in the future to help enable community get togethers like the Community Carnage. I didn't quite have an answer for him at the time, but after a lot of thought, I came up with a potential feature that I think would help make event planning and event advertising much simpler. Now I'm by no means an expert on hosting events so perhaps I don't quite have the same understanding that other community members might have, but in my mind, there are two large problems inhibiting widespread community activities in games. First and foremost, people are rather lazy. I might be in a dozen different groups, I might not visit the website often enough or for very long, and I probably don't have the time to click on each and every one of my private groups to see what's going on for that week. Our solution will need a way to cater to these people's lazyness and make as easy as possible for them to know what events are going on when. Second, event hosters can have trouble with advertising their events with the current tools they are given to work with. This goes hand in hand with the earlier problem: because lazy group members might not visit their groups often enough to even realize that there might be events going on, advertising events soley in your group isn't a reliable way to ensure both attendance and variety in attendees. You can try advertising in the classifieds, or if you have permission you can advertise in the Community Forum in an attempt to reach a wider variety of people, but even then, you're limited to whoever regularly visits that forum / sees the thread while it's live on the front page. Not to mention, such a model won't work if multiple groups want to advertise their events, as the main forums will quickly be flooded with advertisements and everyone will drown each other out. [quote][/quote] Now what if there was an option under "Private Groups" in the Profile Tab called "The Bungie Scheduler" which, when clicked, took me to a calendar page which displayed all upcoming events scheduled by every group that I'm a member of? As a lazy Bungie.net user, such a webpage would make it extremely easy for me to see what events are coming up and which ones I'd like to participate in. Not to mention, because users only have to go to one place to learn about upcoming events, it makes it much easier for groups to advertise their events to their own members. I made up a quick [url=http://i868.photobucket.com/albums/ab249/Hylebosaiden/BungieSchedulerMockup.jpg]Mockup[/url] of what the idea could look like, courtesy of Microsoft Office Outlook. To make this feature work properly, groups need the abillity to schedule official events. In general it would work much like Group News does at the moment, you could give certain security roles the abillity to Submit Events, Approve Events, Post Events Directly, and Edit Events. Once you create an event, you are given various fields to fill out. Obviously the event needs a name, description, a starting time and an expected ending time, but you should also be able to select what game / venue the event is taking place in. Obviously Bungie Titles should have more built in support than other games, but I'm sure we don't need much else other than a blank field to type in the name of the game and the optional abillity to divide signups into numerous subgroups (Red Team / Blue Team / Green Team / Substitutes, you get the idea). You should also be able to restrict who can view the event and who can sign up for the event, likely by security role, and you should also be able to select an option to post a thread in your group's forum about the event simultaneously as the event post is made. I imagine that it would also be useful for event organizers to delay the event signups to a different time than when the event was first posted. It would also be good if you could reserve specific slots in the event for certain people like hosts, recorders, celebrity guests, whatever. Once you submit the event, it will pop up simultaneously in the forum, in an "Event Feed" on the group's main page, and in each group member's Bungie Scheduler. Clicking on the event in the Bungie Scheduler will link to the entry in the Event Feed, which will optionally link to a discussion thread in the forum. Signing up should be as simple as clicking on a slot and filling in what gamertag you plan to use for the event. Security roles with the abillity to edit events will be able to approve or deny players from the event, in addition to opening up more slots if the event is more popular than people expected. To help promote your event to people who aren't members in your group (and therefore can't see your group's events in their Bungie Scheduler), it would be nice if we could tag our events with relevant keywords so that people using the Searchbar to Search for events that are open to the public. Perhaps we should also include a way for people who aren't members of any group to schedule their own events, in which case they will be relying entirely on the Search Bar / Classifieds forum to get people to their event. It would also be cool if the Bungie Scheduler was used alongside the Group Spotlight as a way to promote groups. From the Group Spotlight, you would be able to view a schedule of all visible events being hosted by the groups being featured for that week. If there was a way to notify groups that they were being featured in advance, they could plan a ton of events aimed towards the public for that week in an attempt to get fresh blood into the group. Naturally there are several problems with the idea. For example, "The Bungie Scheduler" is a terrible name that I came up with at midnight last night, a more sexy name would definitely be prudent. I also imagine that the Calendar would get rather clogged up if you're a member of 25 active groups that all want to schedule events in the same timeslot. It's a bit of a worse case scenario, but I think it's a formatting problem that needs to be tackled none the less. If you have any suggestions towards solving these problems, or if you see any other problems with the idea, don't hesitate to tell me. So what do you guys think? As a group leader, would you take advantage of this scheduler to plan Community Events? What sort of features would you specifically want to get the most out of your events? And as a community member, would you regularly visit the Bungie Scheduler? Is there anything that can be done to help simplify the use of this feature? [Edited on 12.25.2011 7:53 PM PST]