Making a gathering

A title is enough to start. It starts private, and everything else hangs off it once it exists.

Start it before you have the details

A private draft saves with almost nothing in it. To go live it needs a title and a date — or, if the night is not fixed yet, turn on Date to be announced and the page can go up without one. Passes, photos, the guest list, the schedule — all of it hangs off an event that already exists, so make it first and fill it in after.

A Date to be announced page takes Notify me sign-ups instead of selling — an email is enough. When you set the date, everyone on that list is told, and on paid or limited passes they get the first twenty-four hours to claim a spot before anyone else. Such a page cannot be announced to the feed until it has a date.

The photos are the same. The room where guests add them exists the moment the event does — a poster to print, a wall for the TV, and nothing for anyone to install. Photos from tonight, below, is the whole of it.

One gathering, however many posts

The event is the thing. Posting about it, sharing it, someone else mentioning it — those are all pointers at the same gathering rather than copies of it.

That is why editing the event later updates what people have already seen, instead of leaving a stale card in somebody's feed with last week's start time on it.

Time zones

An event carries its own time zone rather than yours. Seven in the evening in Lagos stays seven in the evening in Lagos for a guest reading it in Dallas, which is what everyone means and almost no software does.