Honest question - are their some specific advantages of this alternative 30boxes calendar over a Google one?
The reason I ask is that the committee uses Gmail and Google Docs already for some society matters, so there might be some synergy in also using the Google calendar. Also, I guess Google is pretty reliable and likely to continuously improve their calendar.
Personally, I’ve always preferred the idea of building our own calendar that is integrated with the NZLARPS website database so that game runners can list and edit events themselves, it can handle game registrations and will know who is currently a member for that purpose, only game runners can see the registrations, etc. Such a calendar could in theory also list non-larp events of interest. However, it’s quite an undertaking to program a web calendar that can compete to any degree with the appearance and functionality of something built by a company like Google (and I’d end up being the person making the undertaking), which is why I haven’t pushed that opinion very hard. In fact, the event lister I’ve built that’s on the NZLARPS website almost reaches these requirements already. The two main things I think are missing are 1) it doesn’t look like a monthly calendar, it looks like a list of events 2) it doesn’t handle recurring events.
I think it’s inevitable that events will be listed in multiple places, and not necessarily a bad thing as it may reach different audiences. We have:
- Event notices here on Diatribe
- Event listings on the NZLARPS website
- Events posted on Facebook
- The (disused) Google calendar, or some replacement
- Selected events listed on whatislarp.co.nz for promotion
- Events listed on nzrag.com, especially Wellington ones
- Events listed on the Wellington larp email list
There’s a lot of redundancy, but any extra advertising that makes one more person likely to hear about an event and attend seems good to me.
The problem is when an event organiser wants to know what events are happening, to plan their own. For that purpose, what’s needed is at least one calendar that is completely exhaustive and always up to date, listing every known event of interest to larpers. The only two options there are an extended version of the calendar on the NZLARPS website (to include non-larp events and to show them in calendar layout) or something like the Google or 30boxes calendar. So I think it would be best to do revive the Google (or 30boxes) calendar now as the exhaustive listing. If at some later date the NZLARPS website calendar is updated to meet all requirements, we could always shift to using it then.