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Moderators have the ability to create community events, which show up in the highlighted box on the front page along with featured meta posts and sometimes other posts. Currently, community events can link only to URLs in the Stack Exchange network.

I think we can trust moderators with a little more freedom than that. Please allow us to link anywhere from community events. The proximate cause of this request is community blogs, which Stack Exchange will no longer host -- we'd like to be able to easily highlight new posts without creating and featuring a new meta post for each one. (On Worldbuilding and I think Science Fiction and Fantasy, that would have meant 40+ such meta posts just in the last year.)

I imagine that there are other uses for off-site links for community events. Space could use them for launches (which they currently track via chat events), for example.

We trust moderators to handle much more sensitive tasks than community events. We're not at risk of spamming here. Could we please open this up?

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The purpose of this restriction - which also applies to employees - isn't to stop spamming.

...it's to ensure there's a space for discussion and other interaction. Interaction among members of the community.

If an event points directly off-site, then there's a good chance that won't happen, or won't be accessible to all members of the community.

A chat event or meta post ensures that even when the event has ended, there'll still be a record of it, notes to review or look back on. A history.

As these sites age... And my own memory with them... I find this increasingly useful. I expect I'm not the only one.

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  • Could we find some way to whitelist or review sites, or just make this guidance explicit? All the blogs, AFAIK, allow for comments right there on the blog, which is where we want them, and we've found our blog to be helpful for building our SE community. A reminder right there on the "create event" page about what events are for, plus responsible moderators, should address this. (I don't believe I've seen this guidance before, for what that one data point is worth.)
    – Monica Cellio
    Commented Oct 18, 2016 at 12:49
  • Worth noting that there's already a separate route into the bulletin for blogs, @Monica - one that requires considerably less maintenance than scheduled events. If we wanted to feature off-site blogs, would be considerably less awkward just to use that system.
    – Shog9
    Commented Oct 18, 2016 at 15:12
  • There is, Shog? I know there's a path in for SE blogs; are you saying we can do that automatically for our blog hosted on Medium? How can we get that?
    – Monica Cellio
    Commented Oct 18, 2016 at 15:30
  • The system was built for the WordPress blogs; presumably it could be used for other systems, but would probably need some adjustment; I'm not familiar enough with Medium to know how much work would be required there (the current logic just operates on an RSS feed). There's also the moderation aspect: we've had at least one instance in the past where someone was posting some fairly inappropriate stuff on one of the blogs; we'd need some way of ensuring oversight (by moderators / community members; we could always turn off the feed, but ideally it wouldn't come to that).
    – Shog9
    Commented Oct 18, 2016 at 15:36
  • Medium has RSS, which we use to feed into our chat room. But chat eyeballs << front-page eyeballs, and we'd like more visibility. I believe all SE blogs now are (by policy, IIUC) overseen by at least one moderator, so you could make that oversight a requirement for publishing the feed to the site.
    – Monica Cellio
    Commented Oct 18, 2016 at 15:47

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