Add events UI, API and related tools

[Frooxius]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

Currently discovering and planning events on Resonite requires using external third party solutions or community made tools.

This has worse disxoverability and poor integration with the in-game events.

This affects public events, like Creator Jam, platform events (e.g. Livestreams) once in a time events (like Bassirisk), semi-private community events or games (like Blood on The Clocktower) or even personal events, like watch parties with friends.

The goal is to provide more tooling to make those events easier to host and also easier for users to see what's going on the platform and what's coming up.

Describe the solution you'd like

Add a native system for registering events along with calendar UI and other tooling to accompany it.

The system should allow:

• Any user/group can create event int the system
• Events have a start and end time at very least, along with event name
• Events also have visibility - who can see them - e.g. Public, Contacts, Group members or just selected people (for private events)
• Events might require people to register attendance on advance to be able to attend, with possible limits
• Additional metadata can be added on top - images, description, tags and so on

When the event is running additional tools should be available :

• Can associate session or sessions with the event
• Optionally only allow signed up users to join
• Allow the user to easily join the event world directly
• Get list of attendees afterwards (and optionally make it public), serving as a record of the event
• Once more social features are added, allow sharing of media related to the event

The UI should let people:

• View events available to them and ones they registreded to attend
• Search events
• Create, modify and cancel events they made in the same in-game UI
• Get notifications before the event starts or if something changes
• View signed up users (of owner or if the list is public)

Additionally there are some other useful features for this system:

• Import/Export/Sync with other calendar systems (Google Calendar, NextCloud, Radicale... )
• Documented API for custom integrations (e.g. Games like Blood On The Clocktower that have their own calendar / sign up system)

The implementation for this would also be generalized, using data feeds and some new primitives, like calendar views and so on.

There also more things that I haven't super covered, if you feel there are important things this should do, please comment! I'll add more stuff too as I think of it.

Describe alternatives you've considered

Using purely external system and integrating that, but this would not have such good integration level.

Additional Context

I'm in a tram on my way to get a COVID booster and Glitch was telling me about a calendar server he's setting up, which reminded me that I wanted to make this issue forverver.

Requesters

Frooxius

[JackTheFoxOtter]

Since we've worked on the Dash Calendar last year, which had very similar goals, I wanted to share some of my thoughts / suggestions for this system (since I've spent way too much time thinking about this integration already):

• You're focusing purely on individual events here, but for some communities, like Creator Jam or Z-Rave, there will be reoccuring events, sometimes additional events to the "main" one that attendees might want to always get informed about. In traditional calendar systems, this would be achieved by sharing an entire calendar, which people can add to their list / subscribe to so they automatically see all events added to that calendar in their overview. I believe it might make sense to allow for this, which could also make import / export of external calendar systems easier. (For the dash calendar we originally wanted to allow adding external calendars as read-only calendars that show up in your overview this way).
• An important aspect of this is sharing / linking events. There are a couple of ways that we planned to approach this:
  • Have a "share" button in the calendar UI, which would spawn out a physical calendar / event link you can just hand to someone else, which they can then add to their calendar
  • Have an "event / calendar poster" you can make a static part of worlds, with a button that users can click to directly add that calendar / event to their calendar. If this was implemented as a specialized button event, people could make all sorts of custom systems! (But you'd probably want a userspace confirmation dialog to prevent people from adding events to another person't calendar without their consent).
  • For the "landing page", it's probably best to show a chronological list of upcoming events, in a sort of "endless scroller". But more traditional calendar month / week views would be incredibly useful as well, especially for event planning and an easier way to see what event happenes at a specific date
  • If a traditional calendar view is added though, note that there are some regional differences! Calendars look different all across the world. The main differences to consider are the "first day of the week", and wether or not to show calendar week numbers. For the Dash calendar we've just added those two as settings users could adjust to their liking.
• When an event has a session link associated with it, you'll probably want an option to only reveal that session link once the event has actually started.

I'm definitely still interested in helping out designing the front-end for this if I can!