Do we need guidelines for the front page?

nope. Sorry, but we don't want to have local events on the homepage anymore. There are simply too many of them. Post them on groups.drupal.org and they will show up on the "events" sidebar block.

I put a note in the log section about why I demoted it... But I see the message isn't there when you edit it. To be honest, I never use the log section on my own sites. How do you see what people have put there? Would it be better to file an issue when I demote something? Or email the author?

Michelle

I promoted the event. It was a well written post, and had an awesome custom logo.

Gerhard, there are no hard and fast rules on this. It is good to have good stuff on the front page. It should not have been de-moted. I am in *favor* of people writing good posts, whatever the topic, in hopes of getting it promoted, whether it is about a local event or not.

@ Michelle:

The message is seen when clicking on the revisions tab.

Changing the title since the issue is larger than Badcamp.

We need some guidelines for what can be on the front page or we're just going to be having checkbox wars. I demoted this because I was told by more than one person high up in the Drupal world that local events should not be on the front page. Now you're saying this one should because it's well written and has a nice image. So should the rule be no local events unless they come with a pretty picture? Yeah, that's snarky but also serious. I was asked to care for the front page and I'm only going to do that if I have a clear idea of what is and isn't allowed on there.

So let's discuss. What goes on the front page?

Michelle

In general:

A) Michelle's doing a great job taking care of the front page, and I usually agree with the choices she's made.

B) It's true that we generally don't want local events on the fp anymore...

C) Boris is right that we should have exceptions for "high quality content", regardless of the topic, so long as it's of general interest to the community.

D) Boris is a off when he says "there are no hard and fast rules". Some are hard and fast (has to be related to Drupal, etc). But, I think there are also reasonable exceptions to some of the general rules.

E) We all have a subjective sense of what makes for an appropriate FP post, and we won't all agree 100% of the time.

In this particular case of BADCamp:

F) I'd call it a "regional" Drupal event. It's not a 2 hour meeting at some place in 1 town -- it's a 2 day conference with multiple tracks in a huge metropolitan area with a ton of Drupal interest and contributors. I think that makes it more relevant than a "local" event that we are rightfully trying to outlaw.

G) The post was well written and the logo is cool. ;) Someone who can't attend commented on the post saying they'd love a t-shirt with just the logo, which already proves the post has relevance outside the immediate geographic area.

So, I'd support re-promoting the post and leaving it there. I also think we should write up a page with basic guidelines for what gets promoted, but we'll probably make exceptions from time to time.

Such guidelines might look something like:

1) High quality content. No matter what, anything on the front page must be well-written, no spelling or grammer errors, visually laid out well, etc. Pretty pictures a plus, where appropriate. ;)

2) Relevent or potentially interesting to a sizeable fraction of the Drupal community.

3) Agressive use of a teaser and mindfulness of keeping a small footprint on the fp itself.

4) Event guidelines:
- International events should always be promoted.
- Nation-wide events should usually be promoted.
- Regional events can be promoted if they are for larger-scale conferences as opposed to single events.
- Strictly local events are not allowed.

...

I like Derek's idea of a regional event category. I actually originally thought of BADCamp as a local event, but we have gotten people registering from Hawaii, Vancouver, San Diego, Las Vegas and Denver.

I also have to mention that a year ago it was decided to not promote local events to the front page and add the groups feed in a block and to add the groups event feed to planet. This is a rule actually.

While I agree there is flexibility to it it's what most of us have been following for the last year.

4) Event guidelines:
- International events should always be promoted.
- Nation-wide events should usually be promoted.
- Regional events can be promoted if they are for larger-scale
conferences as opposed to single events.
- Strictly local events are not allowed.

This list seems like going from biggest to smallest. Anyway, it would be nice to define these concepts first, before basing rules on them. A national event in Europe could easily be a small event, think about a local conference in Italy for example. A region on the other hand (in my definition) could easily be bigger than a nation. A German language conference in Austria for example could easily attract people from Switzerland, Germany and German speakers from around the region. In fact I would love to see more such regional conferences to bridge the gap between the local DUG events (whatever the size) and the huge DrupalCons. Anyway, personal wishes aside, I just intend to point out that a nation could be quite small :)

What about defining it by how many out of town attendees are expected? If an event is expected to have 100 people but they are all local, then you're lucky to be in a Drupal rich area, but it's still a local event not of much interest to the world-wide Drupal population. But an event that is expecting 100 people from outside the area is a larger scale event.

Perhaps the simplest thing to do is define the rule as no events on the front page and exceptions taken on a case by case basis. If you want to promote an event, file an issue with your reasons. If there are no objections within a day or two, promote it. If there are objections, discuss it. If an event isn't planned far enough in advance to wait a day or two before promotion, then it likely doesn't belong on the front page anyway.

About dww's rule #1 (well written, etc). There was a post that sepeck promoted a while back that wasn't well written but it was promoted (IIRC) because it detailed what they went through and showed that you don't need a staff of professionals to do a Drupal site. If we follow this rule, what do we do in cases like this? My opinion is that the person wanting to do the promoting write a "lead in" story. Just a paragraph or so introducing it and explaining why we are drawing attention to it. This would keep the front page nice looking but not exclude posts that would be there if they were just written better, especially those of people whose language is not English.

The rest of the rules sound good.

Michelle

Re: event sizes, etc -- I was just very quickly jotting down an initial draft of some guidelines, not hard and fast rules. I agree that the relative sizes can be skewed, especially in Europe, where some of the countries are smaller than certain metropolitan areas in the U.S. ;) And, my whole point in #9, plus the wording of the "rules" in #10 was meant to be flexible based on case-by-case analysis of the event and its potential relevence.

The "how many out-of-towners do you expect" approach is interesting, but probably hard to gauge (especially *before* it goes on the front page).

Really, the best bet might just be some combination of a common-sense interpretation of my draft guidelines, taking into account Gabor's important points on the varying sizes of "national" in different parts of the world, and Michelle's point that by default, events never go on the fp, and case-by-case exceptions are made via the webmasters issue queue...

Meanwhile, back to BADCamp -- seems like there are quite a few votes in favor of promoting (Michelle, Boris, dww) not to mention the organizers (Chris + starbow), and the only opposing vote was killes on the "no events, period" side (even though, obviously, DrupalCon posts always go up). So far, there's been no strong objection to the "this is a big, regional, multi-day event, so we should make an exception". Unless someone strongly and clearly objects in the near future, I say we put it back on the fp. We could even add a small note at the bottom of the post about the exception being made to the "no local events on the fp" rule, and why, to help people understand the process...

A little history. I worked with Chris to get the post written, he wrote it, and then I agreed to promote it. This is a effectively, a DrupalCon, and is only not considered one because we just had one that was 3X larger.

I ran into this problem in Barcelona in which there had recently been a DrupalCon Brazil[edit: *], but since we had this event policy it was not promoted. The net result is that dozens if not hundreds of people throughout Brazil were not made aware of DrupalCon Brazil, even after the event was over.

G.D.O content is not adequately promoted on Drupal.org and remains effectively disconnected from most of the community. This certainly bears out in the traffic numbers.

Let's agree to promote reasonable size events on the home page and consider adding a g.d.o events feed block to the home page of Drupal.org.

A g.d.o events feed block *is* on drupal.org for quite some time now but it is very ineffective. We have a lot more events, and at the same time most events are not relevant for most people. So instead of a plain old list which did not work we need to spice it up. I am volunteering (http://hojtsy.hu/node/32) to fix event related problems and improve the situation, not just to talk about it. Now Moshe and Karen are working hard to fix event *bugs* on groups.drupal.org by migrating to CCK based event handling which also allows us to be more targeted on events. Some stuff on my agenda:

- find out how to add locations to events, what's the best way, so we can highlight closer (to the user) events better (and make it happen)
- add types to events, so we can highlight bigger events better
- use user location data and relate it to event location and size data to provide targeted event suggestions

Of course this is a long route, and we are still at fixing event bugs, not into implementing new features, but I firmly believe that events of any size need better support, more spotlight, because this is one of the most important things for Drupal world domination :)

Sidenote: even the cheap looking iframe interated Google calendar block on http://joomla.org looks better then our event list block on drupal.org.

BTW I think "Events" should have a prime spot in the wireframe of the drupal.org redesign, right in the middle of the front page definitely NOT with node teasers but with nice custom formatted blurbs.

I see the groups.drupal.org events block now. I was editing the post at the time and the block does not show up on /edit paths, which is a good thing.

I agree that the block is not that effective, particularly due to the titles. Part of the problem is also the size of the contributor links block. There are 35 links in that block and it takes up too much real estate for all user personas. I'd like to see the contributor links block shrink in favor of a shorter block.

Gabor, your ideas for improving the events situation on Drupal.org seem right on, and might ultimately offer a good compromise for not promoting events to the home page.

But my ideas do not mean there is no requirement to do something until all these improvements happen, so we need the interim decisions for sure.

All we have to do is define a Drupalcon or Drupalcamp as not local events.

I vaguely remember a preferred definition of these two types of events as well.
Drupalcon - conference, expect admittances fee, schedules.
Drupalcamp - those free events...

Just for the record, it would be good for BADCamp to stay off the front page at this point. We have maxed out at 200 registrations.

For what it's worth, a similar conversation about which events get promoted to the front page is starting up again in the post about the Do it with Drupal seminar. Having just been to DrupalCamp LA, I'm curious what the policy actually is and how to get it posted in or near the advertising FAQ so that it's easier to find than this particular issue.

I didn't even know there was a DrupalCon Brazil until reading Kieran's comment about it. Amazing.

Hmm, neither did I.

FYI, my response to this is posted at http://drupal.org/node/307660#comment-1015139. We're gonna need some written guidelines soon.

Marking this discussion as closed. The discussion should continue on this thread: http://drupal.org/node/279479 Let's get to some guidelines to the front page post guidelines so that the Drupal site maintainers can have some consistency.

Kieran

I'm changing the title of this thread because it shows up too high in searches, outshining the actual guidelines.